Premiere Pro Productions Workflow: Where Client Review Fits for Editing Teams

The Premiere Pro Productions workflow we had set up really carefully for an episodic series was working perfectly when we got on a review call in my agency, three editors cutting inside it, and on our side nobody was saving over anybody's project, right. Then the client joined and started reading notes off a document stitched together from two different export links. Half of those notes were for an episode that had already moved two versions ahead, and the other half pointed at timecodes from a cut one of my editors had quietly re-exported the night before, so basically nobody on that call could agree on which frame we were even talking about.

We spent most of that hour lining up timecodes instead of making creative decisions, and I hung up thinking my editors had a beautifully organized system while the client had absolutely nothing, right. That call is why I now treat Productions as two separate problems, because it solved the one between my editors and did nothing for the one between my editors and the people paying for the show.

So here is how I set up Productions for a team of three to fifteen editors, with a worked example you can copy, and then how I lay a proper review layer on top, which is basically how we run it in my agency today.

What Premiere Pro Productions solves and what it leaves out

A Production in Premiere is basically a folder on shared storage that Premiere treats as one container, and inside it you keep small, separate projects, one per episode or per reel, all pointing at the same media without making duplicate copies. Scratch disk settings live at the Production level so every project inside inherits them, and when you pull a clip from one project into another, Premiere keeps a reference instead of importing the file again, which on a long series saves you from a really really messy media folder.

The part that actually matters for a team is project locking, right. When one editor opens a project with write access, everybody else can still open it but only as read-only until that editor closes it, so two people can't save over each other's work. That single behavior is why most of the post houses I know moved their multi editor Premiere workflow from the older shared projects Premiere Pro introduced first over to Productions, and to be very honest, for episodic or long-form work it's the cleanest team feature Adobe has shipped in years.

The catch here is that everything Productions does happens on your storage, between people who all have Premiere installed. The client and whoever signs off on their side are nowhere near that storage, and Productions has no idea which version they watched or whether episode three is approved, so it handles the editor half of the broader post-production pipeline really well and then simply stops at the edge of your team.

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Productions keeps my editors from overwriting each other, right, but it has no idea what the client thinks of the cut.

Structuring a Premiere Pro productions workflow for multiple editors

The way I lay it out is pretty boring on purpose, one Production per show or per client and never one giant Production for the whole studio, because at the end of the day you want an editor to open a Production and only see things they might actually touch.

Setting up the Production before anyone cuts

Most of the pain I've seen with Productions comes from rushing the setup, right, so this is the order we follow before a single clip goes on a timeline.

1. Mount the shared storage at the same path on every edit machine, so media links survive when a project moves between editors.
2. Keep every editor on the same Premiere Pro version for the whole show, because a project saved in a newer version won't open in an older one.
3. Create the Production from File, New, Production, directly on that shared storage, and set the scratch disks once in the Production settings.
4. Have each editor enter their real name in the Collaboration preferences, so a locked project shows who is holding it.
5. Create the assets project, the dailies project and one project per episode before cutting starts.

A worked example with four editors

For instance, say you have a ten-episode series with four editors and one assistant editor. The Production is called SHOW03 and holds twelve projects, SHOW03 ASSETS for music, graphics and logos, SHOW03 DAILIES for the dailies and selects that the assistant owns, and SHOW03 EP01 through SHOW03 EP10, with each editor owning two or three episodes and the lead editor owning the assets project so a music swap only ever goes through one person. The stage lives in the sequence name inside each project, for instance EP04 ROUGH and then EP04 FINE, and I'm pretty sure that one naming habit saves us more confusion than any single feature does.

Episode projects stay small, because a small project opens and saves fast. The other habit is lock discipline, right, since an open project holds its lock and there is nothing more annoying than a senior editor waiting to fix episode two while the person holding it has gone to lunch, so editors close a project the moment they step away. If you work in stages, the split between offline and online editing stages is a natural point to hand an episode from the cutting editor to whoever handles conform and finishing.

A bigger shop runs the same structure with more Productions open, and our page on review for post-production houses covers how the client side scales. The structure is simple on purpose, because the complicated part is everything after a cut leaves your storage, does that make sense, right?

Why client review needs a separate layer from shared projects

Once a cut is ready it leaves Productions entirely, right. The editor exports it, uploads it somewhere and sends a link, and the feedback arrives through whatever channel the client prefers, which in my agency means email for some clients and WhatsApp voice notes for others. Multiply that by three to fifteen editors each running their own client thread, and you see what I mean here, the part that decides whether a show gets approved has almost no structure.

This is where most editing team review processes break, and it is rarely the editor's fault. The client watches an early rough cut on their phone and types that the music drops too early somewhere around the middle, so now your editor has to guess both the frame and the version, and every one of those guesses tends to turn into an extra round you never needed.

So the fix I landed on is one PlayPause project per client, sitting on top of however many Productions that client has, and every editor's cuts land in it no matter which Premiere project they came from. The client opens one link in a browser with no account and no install, their comments stick to the exact frame, and they can draw on the frame when words don't work. New versions stack on the same card as MV1, MV2, MV3 and so on, so in the SHOW03 example the client project holds ten episode cards, with EP04 carrying the rough cut as MV1 and the fine cut as MV2. The page on how we manage every client project in one place shows the layout, and I covered the same idea in the remote editing review layer.

Productions alone

editors share projects cleanly but client notes still arrive by email and WhatsApp with guessed timecodes

With a review layer

every client note lands on the exact frame of the right version in one PlayPause project per client

Review_Cut_v4.mp4In Review

212160p · ProRes

00:34 / 02:18

SR

Sarah 0:34

Frame-accurate note, everyone sees the exact same thing.

Giving every editor the same review panel inside Premiere

The piece that made this actually stick with my editors is the PlayPause panel for Premiere Pro, because editors really really don't want another browser tab open while they cut. Each editor installs the panel and pairs it with their own code, and from then on they upload the cut straight from the timeline into the client's PlayPause project instead of hunting for an exported file.

When the client leaves notes, those comments show up inside Premiere in the panel, and clicking one moves the playhead to that exact frame, so the editor reads the note and is already sitting on the moment it refers to. For a team the important part is that everybody works the same way, right, whether it's the senior editor on episode one or a freelancer who joined last week.

1Install the PlayPause panel in every editor's Premiere

2Pair each panel with that editor's own code

3Upload each cut from the timeline into the client project

4Click a client comment in the panel to jump the playhead

There are two things I would watch here, right. Agree on how editors reply to and close out client notes, since no tool creates that discipline by itself, and I wrote about how we standardize review rounds across editors on retainer work. And if titles or motion go through After Effects, the native PlayPause integration only lives inside Premiere Pro, so that pass gets exported, uploaded and reviewed in the browser, which I covered in the graphics pass in After Effects post.

Roles and approvals when several editors touch one show

With several editors on one show, the real risk is two people telling the client a cut is final when only one of them should make that call. PlayPause has four roles, Owner, Admin, Manager and Editor, and I map them simply, so the Owner is me or the studio head, Admin goes to whoever runs the workspace, Manager goes to the lead editor or producer on each show, and everybody cutting sits in Editor. Our house rule is that only the Manager on a show moves a cut to Approved and tells the client it is final, and trust me on any level, keep that to one or two people per show, because when everybody can call a cut final nobody really owns the approval.

Pricing matters once your team grows, right, because PlayPause is flat per workspace and not per member, so adding a ninth editor or a two-week freelancer costs nothing extra inside the plan's member limit. Agency gives you 50 members for $19 a month and Enterprise gives you 150 members for $27 a month, whereas Frame.io is priced per seat from $15 per user per month, so as rough illustrative math a ten-person team at that entry price already pays $150 a month.

50

members on the Agency plan

150

members on the Enterprise plan

$19

a month for the whole Agency workspace

For team visibility I switch on the Slack integration so every comment posts to the show's channel, and editors use threaded replies and @mentions to pull in whoever owns that episode. Once a cut is approved, lock it on the Premiere side too, and I have written up how to lock a sequence for final review so late fixes don't quietly overwrite it.

Tracking episodes and cuts with custom statuses

On an episodic show a producer mainly wants to know where each episode stands, right, and that answer used to live in someone's head or a spreadsheet nobody updated, so I create custom statuses in PlayPause that match how we move an episode through the building.

• Assembly in progress
• Rough cut with client
• Notes being addressed
• Fine cut with client
• Approved for online
• Delivered to client

Version stacks do the rest, because each episode card holds MV1 through MV4 and beyond, and on Agency and up the side-by-side version compare shows the client exactly what changed between two cuts. Who-watched analytics shows who opened a link, when and from which city, so before a call I know whether the client actually watched. Playbooks, on Agency and up, are basically a per-client document of creative style and direction with checklists that aren't done until someone ticks them, so a new editor on episode nine reads the rules before cutting a single frame. If an assistant editor runs the tracking, the post on how to track revision rounds across editors goes deeper.

One client, one PlayPause project

However many Productions and editors sit behind a show, the client only ever sees one project with every episode, status and version inside it.

Frequently asked questions

Does Premiere Pro Productions include client review?

It doesn't, and that is fine, because it was built for a different job, right. Productions handles project sharing, locking and media references between editors on your own storage, with no client-facing link and no frame-accurate client comments. So you still need a review layer for people outside your team, which is where I put PlayPause, one project per client with every editor uploading into it through the Premiere panel.

Can every editor on the team have their own PlayPause panel?

Every editor installs the panel on their own machine and pairs it with their own code, so each person uploads into the same client project and sees the client's comments on their own cuts without leaving Premiere. Since pricing is flat per workspace, the only thing to watch as the team grows is your plan's member limit, not a bill that climbs with every editor.

Which PlayPause plan fits a team of 3 to 15 editors?

For most post houses and agency edit teams I would start with Agency at $19 a month or $199 a year, because you get 50 members, 250 GB of storage, unlimited projects, 90-day links, AI transcription, side-by-side compare and Playbooks. Creator at $9 works for very small teams with 10 members, and Enterprise at $27 makes sense when you need white-label or a custom share domain, while SSO and SAML are coming in February 2027 and aren't available yet.

What if part of the team cuts in DaVinci Resolve?

The native PlayPause integration only lives inside Premiere Pro, so Resolve editors export, upload into the same client project, and read the notes in the browser or desktop app before applying them in their timeline. The client experience stays identical, same link and same frame comments, which is really the point of keeping review separate from the editing tool. I wrote more about this in the post on switching from Premiere Pro to Resolve.

If your editors already run Productions smoothly and your client side still lives in email threads, try the review layer on one show first. Every plan on the PlayPause pricing page comes with a 7-day free trial, so run a single episode through it from upload to approval.

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