Post Production Schedule Template With Review Rounds Built In

My post production schedule template for a six-episode branded series looked really really good on paper, right, every edit block was sized properly, color and sound had their own days, and delivery sat on a Friday with a little cushion. The one line I had basically typed as "client review, 1 day" between every cut turned out to be the line that sank the whole calendar.

The first cut went out on a Monday, the marketing head who had to approve it was travelling and only opened the link on Thursday night, and her notes landed on Friday with a second set from her brand manager that contradicted half of them, and so on for every round. By the third episode we were two weeks behind, I was paying freelance editors to work weekends out of our own margin, and I had a very very uncomfortable call explaining why a launch date was moving when, to be very honest, the editing had never been the slow part.

So this is the schedule I use now, where every review round is its own block with a viewing window, a notes deadline and an upload date for the next version. I have added the buffer rules I learnt the expensive way, and where PlayPause honestly fits, because it is a review platform and was never built to be your scheduler.

Why post schedules slip at review

Almost every schedule template I have downloaded over the years is a spreadsheet that shows edit, color, sound and delivery as neat bars, with review squeezed in as one thin line. The catch here is that edit time is the part you can actually estimate, right, I know roughly how long my editors take to turn a day of interviews into an assembly, but I have no idea how long a marketing team of four takes to watch a three minute film, agree with each other and send one clean list.

That gap is where most of the slipped deadlines in my agency have come from. Review time is controlled by people outside your building, with launches, travel, legal checks and their own bosses, so a schedule that treats their time like an editor's time is basically a wish. Read any standard description of post-production stages and you get editing, sound, color and visual effects, while the client's calendar is nowhere on that list, even though it decides when half of those stages can start.

Notes also arrive in pieces over email, WhatsApp and calls, so the editor starts the next version early and redoes half of it when the late set lands. The producer never really knows whether the client has watched either, because sent and seen look identical from your side of the inbox. I wrote separately about who owns each review stage, because a schedule only works when one name sits next to every round.

The phases of a post production schedule

I'm pretty sure you know the phases already, so what matters here is where the gaps sit between them. It starts with ingest, where footage is backed up, synced and logged, and on bigger shoots the dailies from each shoot day get watched so problems are caught while the crew can still reshoot.

Then comes the assembly, every usable take in story order, and from it the editor builds the rough cut, which is the first version a client should ever see. The fine cut tightens pacing, music and structure and ends at picture lock, the moment nobody is allowed to move a shot anymore. After lock, color, sound mix, motion graphics and captions all run in parallel on the same locked picture, and then delivery covers masters and cutdowns.

Now here is how I think about it as a video editing schedule, right. Review round one sits between the rough cut and the fine cut, round two sits between the fine cut and lock, and the final review comes after finishing. Those rounds are where the real risk lives, so they get their own rows, owners and dates.

Building review rounds into the timeline

Every review round is a block made of four parts, and I write all four into the post production timeline template before the project starts, which is why the round count always goes into my proposal with a review process instead of staying vague.

The first part is the viewing window, how long the client has to watch, and for a short brand film I give two working days. The second is the notes deadline at the end of that window, and it is for one consolidated list from one person, right, never a stream of messages from everybody who saw the link. The third is the editor turnaround, two or three days depending on how heavy the round is. The fourth is the upload of the next version, which in PlayPause stacks on the same card as MV1, MV2, MV3 and so on, so nobody reviews an old file by accident.

What changed things for me was naming the rounds on the schedule itself. A row that just says review is invisible, while "MV2 viewing window, Tuesday and Wednesday, notes from the brand lead by 6 pm Wednesday" is something a client can drop straight into their own calendar and treat like a meeting. Trust me on any level, that one change does more for a video review rounds schedule than any tool I have tried, and for the sign off itself I lean on approvals inside PlayPause, so approved is a status on a specific version rather than a thumbs up lost in a chat.

Buffer rules for client feedback

Buffers are where most schedules lie to themselves, because people add one big lump of float at the end and then spend all of it in round one without noticing. Every rule I use now came from a project that went sideways.

Every review round gets its own float day directly after the notes deadline, and if it is not used, the schedule moves forward a day instead of the float rolling into the next round. Every extra approver beyond the first adds half a day to the viewing window, so a film with, for instance, a brand lead, a product manager and a legal reviewer gets three working days instead of two. And no viewing window opens on a Friday or the day before a public holiday, right, because the cut will sit unwatched all weekend and your editor pays for it on Monday.

The rule clients push back on is that partial notes do not start the editor clock. If three people need to comment and only two have, the editor waits, because building MV2 on two thirds of the feedback is how you end up with an MV2.5 that nobody budgeted for. Once the rounds in the quote are used up, any extra round gets billed, which I explain in my post on billing for extra revision rounds, because a buffer without a boundary slowly turns into free work. Does that make sense, right, the float day keeps the delivery date safe, and the round limit in the quote stops the margin leaking away one small favour at a time.

Tracking the schedule against real status

A schedule is only useful if you can see whether reality still matches it, and this is where PlayPause earns its place. I keep the dates in a sheet or in Notion, and I wrote about pairing a Notion production template with a review tool, because Notion is great at dates and terrible at frame notes.

Inside PlayPause I set up custom statuses that mirror the blocks in the schedule, so a card moves from MV1 in edit to MV1 with client to notes in to MV2 in edit, right up to approved. With eight cards moving at once, one screen shows me which episode is behind, which is a big part of the weekly job I describe in post supervisor responsibilities.

The second thing I lean on is who-watched analytics, on Creator and up, which shows who opened the link, when, and from which city. If a viewing window opened at 10 am and by 3 pm nobody has played the cut, right, I send a polite nudge that afternoon instead of finding out on day two that the link is still unread, and that alone would have saved the series from my opening story.

On the edit side, version stacks keep every MV on one card, and on Agency and up the side-by-side version compare lets the client check whether their notes were actually done. If your editors cut in Premiere, the Premiere Pro panel shows the comments inside Premiere and clicking one jumps the playhead to that frame. Editors on Resolve, Final Cut or After Effects export, upload and review instead, then work from the notes in their own editor.

The last thing to plan is link life, which matters on long documentaries that sit for months between rounds. Share links on Creator last 30 days and the files expire, on Agency they last 90 days, and on Enterprise they never expire, so read how expiring share links behave and put a refresh task on the calendar if any gap runs longer than your plan allows. A client clicking a dead link on the day their window opens is a scheduling failure the producer owns, right, and the video production workflow page shows how this review loop connects to the rest of the pipeline.

A post production schedule template to copy

Here is the exact post production calendar I use for a three minute brand film with three social cutdowns, laid out over twenty working days. Copy it into whatever tool you schedule in and change the day counts to fit, but keep the shape, right, because the shape is what protects you.

• Days 1 and 2: ingest, sync, logging and the start of the assembly
• Days 3 to 5: rough cut, internal review on day 5, MV1 uploaded that evening
• Days 6 and 7: MV1 viewing window, consolidated notes due end of day 7
• Day 8: float day for round one
• Days 9 and 10: fine cut, MV2 uploaded to the same card on day 10
• Days 11 and 12: MV2 viewing window, notes due end of day 12
• Day 13: float day, then picture lock signed as an approval
• Days 14 to 17: color, mix, graphics, captions and cutdowns, MV3 up on day 17
• Days 18 to 20: final viewing window, small fixes, approval and delivery

In the sheet, every block is one row with seven columns: phase, MV number, owner, start date, end date, the status the card should show in PlayPause, and the date its share link expires. That last column is the one I have never seen in a downloaded template.

To fill in real dates, I work backwards from delivery. If the film goes live on a Friday, day 20 is that Friday and day 1 is the Monday three weeks before delivery week, so the MV1 and MV2 windows both open on a Monday and nothing ever opens on a Friday. Then I lay each window against the client's actual calendar, and if the MV2 window falls on the two days their brand lead is at an offsite, I pull the fine cut a day earlier rather than letting that window shrink to one afternoon, you see what I mean here.

For a branded series, I stagger the episodes so that episode two's viewing window runs while the editor cuts episode three. Documentary windows run longer because there are more voices in the room, which is why I wrote about organising consulting producer notes across rounds.

Frequently asked questions

How many review rounds should a post production schedule include?

For most brand films I schedule three rounds, one on the rough cut, one on the fine cut and one on the finished master, and I write that number into the quote. Short social pieces can live with two, while documentaries often need four or more because there are more stakeholders. At the end of the day, the right number is whatever you can price, schedule and defend, and anything beyond it becomes a billed extra round.

Can PlayPause replace my post production calendar?

No, and I would rather be straight about that. PlayPause handles the review side, so frame-accurate comments, version stacks, custom statuses and who-watched analytics, while the dates themselves live in a sheet, in Notion or in your project tool. What PlayPause gives the calendar is truth, because you can see whether the client has actually opened the cut and exactly where each version stands.

What do I do when a client misses the notes deadline?

First I check who-watched analytics to see whether they opened the link at all, because a missed deadline with zero views needs a different conversation from one where three people watched and simply have not agreed yet. Then I move the whole schedule by the days lost, tell the client the new delivery date in writing, and use the float day only when the delay is shorter than a day.

If you want to run the review side of this schedule on your next project, every PlayPause plan comes with a 7-day free trial and flat pricing per workspace rather than per member, so check the PlayPause pricing page and pick the plan whose link life covers your longest gap.

So yeah. That's my way of saying it.