The edit took a week. The approval took a month. If that ratio sounds familiar, the problem is almost never the client's taste; it is your process handing them an unbounded, unstructured job called 'feedback' with no deadline. Here is how to fix it.
"Around the part with the drone shot, can the music feel more upbeat?" arrives in an email, refers to a timestamp only the sender can see, and lands in a thread with two other stakeholders replying out of order. Every hour you spend decoding notes like this is production time billed to nobody. The single biggest upgrade is timecoded comments: feedback pinned to the exact frame, visible to everyone, in one place.
Five stakeholders sending five separate opinions is not one round of feedback; it is five. Name a single approver in the kickoff and require consolidated notes: the client gathers their team's comments, resolves the contradictions on their side, and sends one list. This feels strict and reads as professional. It also protects the client from themselves, because contradictory notes produce cuts nobody likes.
Shoots have dates. Deliveries have dates. Feedback floats. Put review windows in the timeline: "Cut one arrives Tuesday; notes due Friday." Most clients meet deadlines they were actually given. For the ones who go quiet, a gentle automated nudge on day three beats you personally chasing, both for your time and for the relationship.
Projects drift when nobody can say what "approved" means. The final state should be explicit: the client clicks approve on a specific version, the system records who and when, and that version becomes the deliverable. No "actually, one more tiny thing" three weeks after the file shipped, because approval was an event, not an email that trailed off.
The polite forcing function: final files unlock when the final invoice clears. Framed up front ("on approval, we invoice the balance and deliver everything"), no client objects, because it mirrors how every other professional purchase works. It also ends the awkward months where the film is in use and the invoice is not paid.
Timecoded notes, one voice, deadlines, explicit approval, delivery on payment. None of these is dramatic alone; together they routinely cut approval time from weeks to days. That is the review workflow Cutvey ships out of the box, with revision rounds counted automatically so round three is a line item instead of an argument.
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