Should You Give Clients Raw Footage? A Policy That Holds
Ownership, release tiers, pricing and delivery: the raw footage policy I run in my own video agency, written down so nobody has to decide it at eleven at night.
Raw footage policy, in most production companies I know, is whatever the most tired person on the team decides at eleven at night in a WhatsApp thread, because nobody wrote a single line about rushes into the contract, right. Everyone has a loud opinion on whether you should give clients raw footage, but very few of us have the clause written, the price listed and the delivery method ready, so the client asks once, politely, and the whole position folds into "sure, I will send you a drive".
I run a video editing agency alongside PlayPause, so I sit on both sides of this. I have winced when rushes we shot got cut by somebody else into something I would never sign, and I have also handed everything over happily because the relationship was worth more than the files, right. To be very honest, both calls were fine, and what was really really wrong was making them in the moment, because a decision made in the moment is always the one that is easiest for the person asking.
So this is the policy I run now, in four parts: the contract, the tier of footage you release, the price, and the delivery, which is where "put it on a drive" quietly undoes everything else.
Why clients ask for raw footage in the first place
A client asking for raw footage is almost never trying to hurt you, and once you know which reason you are dealing with, the conversation stops feeling like a fight, right. Usually it is fear, basically, because somebody senior got burned by an agency that vanished with the assets and now there is an internal rule about source material. Sometimes it is the social team wanting twelve vertical cutdowns of the 90-second film, or legal needing an unedited statement on file, or a new marketing head inheriting everything her predecessor paid for. And sometimes, I say this with love, it is price shopping, because a cheaper editor next quarter needs your footage to exist.
A social team that wants cutdowns and a legal team that needs one unedited statement want very different things, and neither of them actually needs the full card dump.
Most of those can be solved without handing over everything. Cutdowns are a change order you can bill properly, compliance usually needs one clip, and a staff handover needs the finished masters plus a folder structure that still makes sense in six months, right. Only a genuine ownership rule needs the full answer, and that gets settled in the contract long before anyone opens a card.
Raw footage in video contract language, and who owns the rushes
Your statement of work probably lists one 90-second film, two 30-second cutdowns and a vertical version, then says nothing about the 480 GB they were carved out of. That silence is dangerous, right, because in a dispute it gets filled by whoever sounds more confident, and the client is the one who paid the invoice.
The law will not reliably rescue you either. Who owns commissioned footage by default changes from country to country, and in some places it can sit with whoever paid for the shoot unless the agreement says otherwise, so get a local lawyer to read your clause once.
My clause is three plain lines in the same document: the client owns the approved deliverables listed above with full usage rights; camera original media, project files and unused takes stay with the production company for a defined retention window; raw media may be licensed and delivered separately at the listed rate. Those three lines have saved me more arguments than anything else I have written, because they turn a tense request into a menu choice.
the client assumes the shoot day bought every file on every card, and you find out mid project
deliverables are owned, rushes are licensed separately at a listed rate, and nobody is surprised
Retention matters because if rushes stay with you, you are now the archive, and the client will assume that archive is forever. Put a window on it, ninety days or a year, and think properly about how long to keep footage before committing to something you cannot honour. The same document should carry your revision count and the scope creep clauses worth adding, since scope creep and footage requests tend to arrive from the same client in the same week, right.
Selects, full rushes or nothing at all
With the contract in place, you are choosing a tier instead of defending a principle, and I pick one of three before I reply to anything.
Nothing at all is the right call for a portfolio piece, for rushes holding unreleased product or talent whose release form only covered the final cut, or when the relationship has gone strange and you can feel the switch coming. I say it kindly and offer masters in every ratio they need plus a clean folder they can hand to anyone.
Selects is the tier I use most of the time, meaning circled takes, usable B-roll, and the interview answers that made the cut plus the ones that nearly did, colour untouched. It solves the social team and the compliance request at a small fraction of the volume, so it moves in an afternoon. Full rushes, the whole card dump including the takes where the boom dipped into frame, go out only when they were priced in from the start or are being paid for now. Project files stay out of every tier, since they point at our plugins, fonts and licensed music anyway.
Whatever the tier, send a one-page handover note, because raw media without context creates a second round of emails. I list the camera and frame rate, whether it was shot in log and which LUT we used, which audio files sync to which clips, and so on. Skip the log line and the client opens grey, flat clips on a laptop and assumes you shot it badly, you see what I mean here.
The catch here is that selects only works if your media is organised enough to pull them quickly, because if it means scrubbing nine hours of cards by hand, you will give up and send everything. That is the same reason I stopped letting my team collect files from freelancers over personal Drive links.
Charging for raw footage so it stops being free
Charging for raw footage feels awkward the first three times and then stops feeling like anything, trust me on any level. You are pricing the labour of pulling and checking files, the storage you carried, the transcode time, and the future work that account will no longer send you, right, and the original invoice covered none of it.
So I keep two numbers on the rate sheet. One is a media handling fee for selects, sized roughly like half a day of an editor's time. The other is a full archive release fee set as a percentage of the original project value, because a full release on a big campaign costs me far more future revenue. For instance, on an illustrative project worth ten thousand with the release fee at fifteen percent, that is fifteen hundred, and the client can weigh whether they truly need the cards or the selects were fine all along.
A request that costs nothing gets made casually, and a request with a price on it gets thought about properly.
Just do not use the fee as a punishment or set it absurdly high to make the request disappear, because clients can tell and it poisons a good account. Logging, transcoding and moving media after the shoot is genuine post-production work, so price it like a real service and nobody has to feel rude about the invoice.
Share raw footage with client teams without losing control
This is where I see disciplined teams undo all of the above. They win the policy conversation, agree to selects, then send a public folder link from a personal account with no expiry, and eleven months later the footage turns up in an ad nobody mentioned. Couriered drives are no better, they just fail more slowly and more expensively, right.
What I want from delivery is simple: get a lot of big files up at once, put a password on the link, know who opened it, and switch it off when the project ends. In PlayPause you can bulk upload a whole shoot day at 100+ files in one go, the client opens one link in a browser with no account and no install, and every link can be password-protected and revoked instantly. Those sharing and security controls sit on every plan, including Creator at $9 a month.
Link lifetime is the detail to watch if you deliver rushes regularly. Creator links last 30 days and the files expire after that, which suits a one-off selects handover, but a single camera original can easily pass 40 GB and Creator caps each upload at 10 GB. Agency links run 90 days with unlimited upload size, and Enterprise links never expire and can sit on a custom share domain with white-label branding, which is what I would want if raw delivery is a standing service. I lean on the same controls to share a rough cut safely without handing over anything final.
Who-watched analytics, from Creator up, shows who opened the link, when, and from which city, so when somebody says the selects never arrived you have an answer instead of a feeling. It is the same record I use to know if a client watched a cut before their notes come in, and for rushes it simply closes the loop on a delivery you are responsible for, does that make sense, right?
Letting clients save footage into their own storage
A client who asked for rushes usually wants them under their own backup policy, and if you do not give them a clean path, they will invent a messy one with screen recordings and personal accounts. On the Agency plan and above, PlayPause has Google Drive built in, so a viewer can save what you shared straight into their own Drive, and the same integration covers backup on your side. The handover becomes a permission you granted on a link you still control, and with PlayPause media storage on your end, browser playback runs off a streaming copy so the original upload stays untouched, right.
- Password on every rushes link
- Expiry or revoke date in your calendar
- Handover note with camera, log profile and LUT
- Selects folder labelled so nobody guesses
- A written line recording what was released and when
If you are still couriering drives or fighting transfer services that expire without warning, I wrote out how I send large video files without either side losing an afternoon. At the end of the day, delivery is the part of your raw footage policy the client actually experiences, so it deserves as much care as the clause.
A worked example: one rushes request, start to finish
Here is a typical request run through the whole policy, with illustrative details. A brand emails three weeks after delivery asking for everything from a two-day shoot. The contract says deliverables are theirs and rushes stay with us with a licensed release option, so before quoting anything I reply: happy to help, what are you planning to make, because cutdowns only need a selects package this week, while the full archive has a release fee in our agreement.
They say vertical cutdowns for the quarter, so I quote selects as one line item, get a written yes, pull the circled takes, bulk upload them with the handover note, set a password and send one link. Then the expiry goes in my calendar, the who-watched record confirms the right people opened it, and one line in the project file says what was released and when. I'm pretty sure the version of me from five years ago would have sent the drive out of guilt or refused out of pride, and both cost far more than a fee does.
Frequently asked questions
Should you give clients raw footage if they paid for the shoot day?
Paying for a shoot day buys the deliverables you agreed to make, and whether it also buys every file every camera recorded depends on what your contract says. State it in writing before the shoot, offer a priced release option, and apply it the same way to every client, right, because consistency is what makes it a policy, and clients respect a policy far more than a negotiation.
What do I say to a client asking for raw footage mid-project?
Ask what they need it for first, because mid-project the request is usually about anxiety much more than ownership. Most of the time they want reassurance that something exists, or one clip early for an internal meeting, so send that clip on a password-protected link, explain that full rushes are a separately licensed item after delivery, and the pressure drops away.
Is it safe to share raw footage with client teams over a public folder link?
I would avoid it, honestly, because a public folder link has no password, no expiry and no record of who opened it. Use a link you can protect with a password, switch off instantly and check for views, because the day you need to prove what was released and when, that record is worth far more than the convenience ever was.
How much should I charge for raw footage delivery?
I keep two published numbers: a media handling fee for preparing selects, roughly half a day of editor time, and a full archive release fee set as a percentage of the original project value. The percentage scales with the job, and publishing both on your rate sheet means the number is never invented under pressure.
PlayPause handles the delivery half of this, from bulk upload to password-protected links, instant revoking and the who-watched record, and every plan has a 7-day free trial so you can run one real rushes handover through it first. Have a look at what each plan costs and match the tier to how often you release footage, since link lifetimes and upload limits are what bite if you guess wrong.
So yeah. That's my way of saying it.
Saumyajit co-founded PlayPause after years watching review and approval quietly eat creative teams' deadlines. He writes about the workflow side of video, feedback, versioning, and getting to a clean sign-off.
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