In an edit suite, half the review happens by turning the chair around. The producer leans over the editor’s shoulder, points at the screen and says “shorter there”, and the note never gets written down.
Spread the same team across three cities and that conversation disappears. What’s left is a chat thread with sixty messages, three exports called final and a call nobody remembers agreeing to.
This post is about the day-to-day of a team that edits, reviews and finishes from different places. If the hard part is a shoot where the client or the person on camera is somewhere else, our post on remote shoots covers it.
In short
- Write every note so someone can act on it without a call: the frame, the problem and what to do.
- Give each review a deadline with a time zone and one person who sends the merged notes.
- Move footage once, edit from proxies and review cuts on a link that streams.
- Keep where each video stands in one written place, so “where are we?” never needs a meeting.
- Save calls for kickoffs, creative direction and notes that are going in circles.
What changes when the team isn’t in one room
Quick questions stop being free. In the office, a doubt about a lower third costs ten seconds. Remotely it becomes a message, and the message waits until the other person reads it.
With an editor in Lisbon and a producer in São Paulo, three or four hours apart depending on the time of year, a question sent at the end of one person’s day gets its answer the next morning. One open doubt can cost the whole day.
So the job of a remote team is to write things down well enough that nobody has to ask. Notes, decisions, file locations and who is waiting on whom need to live where everyone can read them, and a voice note in a private chat doesn’t count.
Review without a call
Asynchronous review works when each note stands on its own. The editor should be able to open the cut at 7 in the morning, read the notes and start working before anyone else is awake.
Five habits make that possible:
- Put each note on the frame. “The logo at 0:42 covers the speaker’s name” carries its own context, while “the logo near the end” starts a thread. How to give video feedback an editor can use goes through the wording.
- Say what to do, and whether it’s a must. Keep fixes apart from preferences, so the editor knows what can’t be skipped when time runs short.
- Draw or record when words don’t work. A circle on the frame or thirty seconds of screen recording explains a reframe faster than a paragraph.
- Let one person send the notes. When the director, the producer and the client all write straight to the editor, the editor ends up choosing between them. Someone merges the notes and settles the conflicts first (what to do when stakeholders disagree).
- Give a deadline with the time zone. “Notes by Wednesday, 3 pm São Paulo time” means the same thing in both cities, and “when you can” tends to mean next week.
Ask the editor to answer each note, either as done or with a question. A single “on it” for the whole list doesn’t show what was skipped, and remotely nobody notices until the client does.
Moving large files between places
Move the heavy media once and the cuts never. Footage, masters and project files go to one shared place, and cuts for review travel as a link that streams.
The footage needs one home, with the same folder structure on every job (a structure you can copy). Two copies of the media on two drives start to drift apart by the second week.
Do the upload math before you promise a date. 500 GB of footage is 4,000 gigabits, so a 100 Mbps upload needs about 11 hours at full speed. On a shared office connection it takes longer, and a drive sent by overnight courier can arrive first.
An editor at home rarely needs the camera originals. Cutting from lighter proxy files and relinking to the full-resolution media at the end is the usual way around a slow connection (how a proxy workflow works).
Nobody should download a cut to review it. A link that plays in the browser lets the director watch v3 on a hotel connection without pulling gigabytes. The final delivery is a different job, covered in our post on sending large video files.
Name every file with its code and version, so ACM_014_v05 still means something after it’s been forwarded twice (a naming convention).
A weekly routine that replaces the hallway
A remote team needs fewer meetings and more written status. This routine fits a small studio with one or two editors working from home:
- Monday, fifteen minutes on the board. It’s the only call with everyone: what goes to the client this week, what’s waiting and on whom, and who has too much on their plate.
- Every video has one owner and one “waiting on”. At any moment a video is waiting on the editor, on an internal review or on the client. If nobody can say which, it’s stuck.
- Status goes on the task. “v3 uploaded, notes 4 and 7 still open” belongs next to the video, so the producer doesn’t scroll through a chat to find it.
- Internal review happens at a fixed time. If the reviewer watches cuts every day at 4 pm, editors know when their notes come back and plan around it.
- New people get the routine in writing. A freelancer joining mid-project should read how the team works instead of picking it up over a week of messages (onboarding a freelance editor).
What still needs a call
Some conversations go faster live, and forcing them into text wastes days. Get on a call for these:
- The kickoff, where the brief, the tone and the references get argued out.
- The first cut with the creative lead, while the structure is still up for debate.
- A note that has gone back and forth three times without a decision.
- Feedback that is hard to hear, which reads colder in writing than it sounds.
End every call with a written summary on the task. A decision that only exists in a call recording is lost to whoever wasn’t there.
A video team inside a larger company has the same problems plus internal sign-off, which our post on building an in-house video team covers.
How this works in RecReview
In RecReview, every comment sits on a frame of the version, or on a stretch of it if you mark a range. Besides typing, you can draw over the frame or record audio, video or your screen, up to five minutes for audio and video and fifteen for the screen.
Comments marked Team only never show on the client’s link or portal, which leaves room for the editor and the producer to talk through the client’s notes. Typing @ and a teammate’s name sends them a notification, and every comment has a Resolve button, so open notes stay visible until someone closes them.
An interrupted upload picks up where it stopped when you retry. The version plays as soon as the upload finishes, and once the streaming copy is ready the player adjusts the quality to each viewer’s connection, with an option to switch to the original file.
On a Mac, the desktop app’s watch folder uploads each finished export as the task’s next version.
On the board, each card shows what the video is waiting on, such as Internal Review or Client Review. Everyone’s Home lists the versions awaiting their review at the top, then the tasks assigned to them, then their tasks that are waiting on someone else.
Assigning a task notifies the person, and the task’s Activities tab records status changes, uploads and sends to the client. More on notes pinned to the frame on the time-coded comments page.
