The Right Way to Share a Locked Cut With a Sales Agent Before a Market

Film markets run on screeners. Before a sales agent can pitch your film to buyers at Cannes, AFM, or Berlin, they need to have seen it. Often multiple people at the agency need to see it. And you, the producer or director, need to maintain complete control over that material right up until the deal is signed.

The share locked cut sales agent film market secure workflow is one of the most high-stakes file management challenges in independent film distribution. Get it wrong and you have an unprotected copy of your film circulating before you have territorial deals in place. Get it right and your sales agent has what they need, when they need it, with a clear audit trail of who accessed it.

Why This Is Different From a Standard Review

Sharing a cut with a sales agent is not the same as sharing a rough cut with a producer for notes. Nobody is giving feedback on the edit. The sales agent is watching to understand the film so they can sell it. The buyer may also be watching. Neither of them should be able to download the file, share the link forward, or keep a copy after the market.

The risk here is piracy at its most direct: a buyer who is not interested in purchasing the film could still benefit from viewing it if a copy circulates without controls. Watermarking and access controls are not paranoid, they are professional standard practice at any serious sales agency.

What the Sales Agent Actually Needs

Before you set up the screener, ask your sales agent what they actually need and who needs access. Usually it is:

• The agent themselves, to watch and assess the film
• A colleague or associate who handles buyer relationships in a specific region
• Potentially a few specific buyers the agent wants to pre-screen before the market

Each of those people is a different access context. The agent has seen dozens of films and knows how to handle screeners. A buyer invited directly is a less predictable audience and may have less media-industry-standard screening habits.

Set up separate access levels if you can. The agent gets full access. Individual buyers get a more restricted view, potentially time-limited to a few days around the market dates.

Setting Up the Screener Correctly

Here is the specific setup I recommend:

Password-protect the link. The link alone should not be enough to open the film. Anyone who receives the link by accident or from a forwarded email should hit a password prompt.

Enable watermarking. Any viewer who watches the film should see a visible or burned-in watermark with their name or a unique ID. This is not about distrust, it is about chain of custody. If footage leaks, you can trace it.

Set an expiry date. The screener link should stop working after the market ends. There is no reason for buyers to have ongoing access to a film they did not acquire. Set an expiry that gives the agent enough time for their buyer conversations but does not leave the screener open indefinitely.

Do not allow downloads. Watch-only. The buyer can see the film, they cannot take it away.

PlayPause handles all of this in one place. You upload the cut, set a password, enable the expiry, turn off download, and send the link. The sales agent forwards it to whoever they need. You see who opened it, when, and how much they watched. That viewing data is genuinely useful market intelligence.

Managing Multiple Buyers Across Different Territories

A sales agent working a market may have twenty buyer conversations over three days. They may want to show your film to ten of them. You do not want to be the bottleneck: "Can you send a screener to this buyer?" requires a response from you, new link setup, and another round of emails.

The practical solution is to give your sales agent a set of pre-prepared screener links, each with its own password and tracking. The agent distributes them as they need to without having to come back to you for each one. You see in real time which links were opened, by whom (based on who the agent told you each link went to), and how far each viewer got.

For festival screener management at a larger scale, our guide on festival screener version management when you have six submissions running parallel covers how to track multiple active screeners without losing control.

Protecting Unreleased Material While Sharing for Consideration

There is a specific tension in the pre-market period: the film is not yet sold, so its commercial value depends partly on its scarcity. A locked cut that circulates too widely before a market can undercut the exclusivity that makes territorial buyers willing to pay for rights.

This is why the watermark and the expiry matter. But it is also why you need to think carefully about how many links you create and whether you have any intelligence about each viewer's identity.

For productions where unreleased material protection is a primary concern, our piece on how to protect unreleased music while sharing a video cut for approval covers the underlying security principles, even though it comes from the music video context. The logic translates directly.

What to Do After the Market

Once the market is over, expire all screener links. Even if a buyer expressed interest and you are in deal discussions, the market screener should not remain active indefinitely. If the buyer needs to re-screen the film as part of due diligence, create a new link for that specific purpose with its own tracking.

Keep the viewing records. Who watched, when, how far they got. This is not just data hygiene, it is useful context for your sales agent when they follow up. A buyer who started the film but did not finish it is a different conversation from a buyer who watched all the way through twice.

For your own records as producer or director, the sign-off trail on the locked cut itself is also worth keeping. Whoever approved the cut, when, and what version it was. That documentation matters if questions arise later. See our piece on picture lock documentation and how editors prove a cut was approved for how to structure that record.

The Cost of Getting This Wrong

An unprotected screener at a market can cost you territorial deals. Not because buyers are malicious, but because content that looks easy to access looks cheap. Sales agents know this. Buyers know this. When a film arrives with a proper password-protected, watermarked screener with an expiry date, it signals that the producers take the material seriously.

PlayPause's video proofing and approval tools are built for exactly this kind of controlled distribution. The Creator plan at $9/month is enough for a single film in distribution. The Agency plan at $19 covers multiple projects and gives you the workspace to manage several market cycles simultaneously without each one bleeding into the others.