The cut goes out on a Tuesday for one last look. By Thursday it’s on the client’s LinkedIn page, temp music and all, and the final invoice, the one due “on delivery”, has gone quiet.
Nobody stole anything, exactly. The client had a file that looked finished, and once it was published there was no hurry to pay for another one.
Most studios learn this once. The fix is partly technical and partly paperwork, and the paperwork carries more of the weight than people expect.
In short
- No tool can stop screen recording, so what you control is when the clean master leaves your hands.
- Watermarks and low-res copies help in early rounds and get in the way when the client judges the final picture.
- A review link should keep watching and downloading apart, with an expiry date and, if needed, a password.
- The contract does most of the work: deposit, balance on approval, license on full payment, and publishing counts as approval.
What you can and can’t control
Anything that plays on a screen can be recorded, with the screen recorder that comes with the laptop or with a phone held up to the monitor. Streaming services spend heavily on making that harder and still can’t fully stop it, and no watermark or review tool will either.
What you can control is narrower. The clean master, the full-resolution file with the final mix and the licensed music, leaves your hands when the job is paid or formally approved, and not before.
Everything the client watches until then is a review copy, and the contract says so. If someone does download early, you hear about it that day instead of when you spot the video online.
Watermarks protect, and get in the way
A burned-in watermark is the oldest answer. “DRAFT” or “FOR REVIEW ONLY” across the frame, sometimes the client’s name, often burned-in timecode.
A copy with a mark in the middle of the picture is useless to publish, and the timecode pays for itself: notes come back as “at 01:12:04” instead of “the bit after the drone shot”.
The cost is that the mark sits on the image the client is supposed to judge. In a cut about structure and story, nobody minds. In a color or graphics round it’s in the way, and a client who is annoyed by the watermark will comment on the watermark.
A small mark in a corner is kinder to the picture, and also easy to crop out.
A workable compromise is a large, semi-transparent mark in the early rounds, a smaller one once the edit is locked, and none on the version the client approves, which they watch on a link with downloads turned off.
You add the mark in your own export. Premiere has Image Overlay and Timecode Overlay under Effects in the export settings, and DaVinci Resolve does the same job in its Data Burn-In window.
Low-resolution review copies
The other old trick is to send 720p, or a 1080p file at a low bitrate. Uploads and playback get faster, and nobody wants that file on the big screen at their product launch.
It protects less than it seems to. A lot of social video gets watched on phones, where 720p looks fine, so a low-res copy won’t stop a client who has decided to post.
It also hides what the client has to check in the last rounds: soft focus, banding in a gradient, the small print on a lower third. Send low-res for early cuts and full quality when the client is approving the picture.
View-only links that expire
A review link should treat watching and downloading as separate permissions. A transfer link, a Drive folder or a Dropbox link is a download by design. One click and the file is on the client’s laptop, and you have no say in where it goes next.
On a review link the client watches in the browser and comments on the frame (the basics are in how to share a video with clients for review), and downloading stays off until you decide otherwise.
Two settings tighten it. An expiry date that matches the feedback deadline keeps the link from living forever in someone’s inbox, and a password helps when the link is likely to be forwarded around the client’s office.
When a round closes, or your contact leaves the company, cut off the old link and send a new one.
Put the payment rule in the contract
The contract does more than any setting, because it decides what the client owes before anyone opens a file. Four clauses cover most of it:
- A deposit when the job is booked, so you’re never working entirely on credit.
- The balance falls due when the final version is approved, which is also when the master goes out. If you’d rather hold the master until the money arrives, write that instead.
- The license to use the video starts when the final payment clears. Until then the client has review copies, for internal review only.
- Publishing a review copy counts as approval, and the balance is due that day.
Say what counts as approval, too: a button on the review link, an email, or silence for a set number of days. The post on clients who take too long to approve covers that clause and how to follow up when the answer doesn’t come.
Have whoever writes your contracts check the wording, since what a license clause can do depends on where you work.
Clause four is the one that changes behavior. A client who knows the invoice lands the day the video goes up tends to wait for the final file.
How this works in RecReview
RecReview doesn’t watermark videos, and it doesn’t hold the client to a low-resolution copy. The review player adapts to the connection and can play the original file, so the client judges the real picture. If you want a mark on review cuts, add it in your export before you upload.
What RecReview does is keep watching and downloading apart. The review link has no download switch. On the review page, the download button only appears for your team, the video’s owner and client contacts who can approve, and a client sees it after approving the version.
In the client portal, a video can be downloaded once its task is marked as delivered, which means a done status, plus the final phase if you use phases. The exception in both places is “Allow download before approval”, a setting you can turn on for one client at a time.
With the ready-made workflows, a client approval moves the task to Delivered on its own, so approval is when the file goes out. Send the final invoice that day, and let the license clause cover the time until it’s paid.
By default, any client contact who has identified themselves can approve and download. Turn on contact roles and only the client’s managers can approve and download the final, while reviewers comment and ask for changes.
New people who identify on a review link come in as reviewers, and you pick the role for anyone who joins through the portal link on their own.
If a client downloads a version before its task is delivered, the download goes into that contact’s history and owners and admins get a notification saying who downloaded before approval. Review links can have a password and an expiry date, and generating a new link cuts off everyone who had the old one.
