Why You Should Never Send a Raw ProRes Master for Client Notes on a DaVinci Resolve Project

The Moment Everything Goes Sideways

Somewhere in nearly every studio's history there is a story like this one. An editor finishes a cut in DaVinci Resolve, exports a full ProRes 422 HQ master straight out of the timeline, and sends it to the client's Dropbox folder because that is just how it has always been done. Three days later the client's marketing director forwards timecode stamped notes in a spreadsheet, the file has somehow ended up in a shared folder with forty people who were never supposed to see it, and the editor is left wondering why a fifteen minute review took a week. This is not a rare accident. It is basically the default outcome when a raw master gets treated as a review copy, and at the end of the day it is completely avoidable.

We built PlayPause because we watched this exact pattern play out over and over with editors, agencies, and production teams who were doing genuinely good work but were losing days to file handling instead of storytelling. A DaVinci Resolve project deserves a review workflow that respects the footage, respects the client's time, and respects the fact that feedback needs to live somewhere a comment can actually be pinned to a frame.

Why ProRes Masters Are the Wrong Tool for Feedback

A ProRes master exists for one job, and that job is finishing. It is the file you hand to a broadcaster, a distributor, or an archive because it preserves every bit of color depth and detail the grade produced. It was never designed to be a review file, and for instance if you have ever tried to scrub through an eighty gigabyte ProRes 4444 export on a client's five year old laptop over hotel wifi, you already know exactly why this matters. The file chokes, the client gets frustrated, and the notes that come back are vague because nobody could actually watch the cut smoothly enough to give specific feedback.

Right, so the instinct to send "the real file" feels like generosity. It feels like you are giving the client the best possible version of their project. But quality of file and quality of feedback are two completely different problems, and conflating them is exactly how review cycles balloon from two days into two weeks.

The File Size Problem Nobody Budgets For

Here is the part that rarely gets talked about honestly. A twelve minute ProRes 422 HQ master at 4K resolution can land north of 70GB once you include the audio stems and any embedded LUT metadata, and that number climbs fast the moment a project runs longer or the codec gets bumped up to 4444 for a client who insists on it. Now multiply that by every round of revisions, because a raw master usually gets re exported and re sent each time, and you are looking at hundreds of gigabytes moving across email attachments, personal Dropbox links, and file transfer accounts that expire without warning.

That is not a workflow, that is a logistics problem disguised as a creative process. And the editors who eat that cost are rarely the ones who chose to work this way, they inherited it because nobody ever set up something better.

What Happens When a Master Leaks

This is the part that keeps producers up at night and honestly it should. A raw ProRes master has no watermark, no expiring link, no audit trail of who opened it and when. Once it lands in a client's inbox it can be forwarded, downloaded, and reuploaded anywhere, and there is genuinely nothing stopping an unfinished cut, complete with temp music, unlocked graphics, or a brand campaign nobody has announced yet, from turning up somewhere it was never meant to be. Agencies handling pre release trailers, unannounced product films, or sensitive corporate content are taking on real reputational risk every time a master goes out as a plain file instead of through a permissioned review link.

We hear from editors constantly who say the client relationship survived the leak but the trust never fully came back. That is a heavy price to pay for something that a simple expiring share link would have prevented outright. If you want a sense of how differently a proper review platform handles this compared to a bare file transfer, PlayPause vs Wetransfer lays out the gap pretty plainly, and the same logic holds whether the transfer tool is a paid service or a free one.

The Missing Comment Layer Is the Real Cost

Even if the file size were not a problem and the security risk did not exist, there is still the core issue that a ProRes master watched in QuickTime or VLC has no way to receive structured feedback. The client ends up writing "at around 2 minutes the color feels off" in an email, and now the editor has to scrub the DaVinci Resolve timeline manually trying to guess whether that means one fifty eight or two oh four, and whether "color feels off" means the shadows, the skin tones, or the overall LUT.

This is the actual cost of skipping a dedicated review layer, and it is bigger than most studios realize until they measure it. Every ambiguous note costs a round trip. Every round trip costs a day, sometimes more if the client is in a different timezone. A properly built Client Review Portal turns that entire back and forth into something that happens once, correctly, because the comment is attached to the frame instead of floating in an inbox somewhere.

What a Proper Review Workflow Looks Like from DaVinci Resolve

The fix here is not complicated, and it does not require abandoning ProRes for finishing work. It requires separating the finishing file from the review file, which is a distinction a lot of smaller shops never formalized because nobody ever forced the conversation. In Resolve's Deliver page specifically, a saved preset set to H.264 at 1080p and roughly eight to ten megabits per second renders in a fraction of the time a full ProRes export takes and produces a file small enough to open instantly even on a client's phone over a mediocre hotel connection.

That order of operations alone eliminates most of the pain. The client never touches an eighty gigabyte file, the editor never guesses at timecodes, and the studio never has an unwatermarked master sitting in an inbox that outlives the project by years. For teams juggling more than one production at a time, this also solves the quieter problem of Multi Stakeholder Review, where a single cut might need sign off from a director, a brand lead, and a legal reviewer who all need to see different things without stepping on each other's notes.

• Confirm the review link has an expiration date set before sending it anywhere
• Use a compressed proxy, never the full ProRes master, for the first two rounds of notes
• Keep comments attached to the timeline instead of scattered across email threads
• Only export and share the finishing master after the cut is formally locked
• Track who actually opened the link so a leak has a paper trail

When The Client Needs To Judge Color, Not Just Content

There is one legitimate exception to the compressed proxy rule, and it comes up more often than people expect once a project moves into final color. A client who is specifically reviewing a grade, checking skin tones against a brand's approved palette or confirming a look matches previous deliverables in a campaign, is going to notice artifacting and color shifting in a heavily compressed H.264 export in a way a client reviewing story and pacing never will. For that narrow case, exporting a higher bitrate proxy, still well short of the full ProRes master but pushed up to something like 20 to 30 megabits per second with a wider color space than a default web export, is worth the extra file size. The rule still holds either way, the file should still live behind an expiring, permissioned link rather than going out as a bare attachment, and it should still carry the same frame accurate comment layer as every other round. The only thing that changes is the compression target, not the delivery method, and conflating the two is how studios end up either shipping a master they never meant to release or asking a colorist to sign off on a grade they genuinely cannot evaluate properly on a heavily compressed file.

Building the Habit Before the Next Delivery

None of this works as a one time fix. It has to become the default export habit for the whole team, the same way nobody on a professional edit bay would dream of sending an uncompressed camera original to a client just because it technically contains the footage. No Film School has written at length about how workflow discipline separates studios that scale from studios that burn out on their own file management, and this is exactly the kind of discipline that pays for itself the first time it prevents a leak or saves a week of ambiguous notes.

Right, the honest truth is that most studios do not change this habit until something goes wrong, a master leaks or a client complains that a file would not open. We would rather teams make the switch before that happens, because the fix costs nothing and the failure mode costs a client relationship. It also helps to have a home base for the finished footage once the project wraps, and this is where solid Media Storage practices matter almost as much as the review workflow itself, since a locked cut still needs somewhere organized to live.

Send the Link, Not the Master

At the end of the day, a DaVinci Resolve timeline is worth protecting, and so is the time everyone spends giving and receiving notes on it. Basically the rule is simple, masters are for delivery, links are for review, and the two should never be the same file. We built PlayPause specifically so editors could stop choosing between sending something the client can actually watch and sending something secure enough to trust, because for instance that tradeoff should never have existed in the first place.

If your team is still exporting full masters for every round of notes, it is worth seeing what a flat price, per workspace review platform actually changes about that process. Check PlayPause pricing to see how a single workspace can cover an entire studio's review traffic without the per seat costs that make agencies ration who gets access, browse the PlayPause blog for more workflow breakdowns like this one, or head to PlayPause and get a compressed review link out the door on your next cut instead of a master that was never built for the job.