Getting client approval on AI video without endless Slack threads

Why "can you check the new cut?" goes so badly

A cut goes out as a shared file or a screen-recording link. Feedback comes back as a screenshot in a chat thread, or a message like "the part around the middle feels off." Neither pins the note to an exact moment in an exact version of the video, so half of every reply is spent confirming what's actually being discussed before anyone can act on it.

Multiply that by three rounds of notes and two people commenting, and the review process alone can take longer than the edit did.

What actually fixes it: comments pinned to a timestamp

The fix isn't a better chat app — it's removing the translation step between "where in the video" and "what I'm looking at." A comment that's attached to a specific second of a specific cut answers "where" automatically. The reviewer scrubs to the moment, leaves the note there, and whoever reads it later can jump straight to that frame instead of re-watching the whole thing to find it.

Reviewers shouldn't need an account

The person you most need feedback from — a client, a producer, a stakeholder who isn't on the production team — is usually the person least willing to create an account, learn an editing tool, or dig through a shared drive folder to find the latest version. A review link that opens straight to the cut, lets them leave a name and a comment, and requires nothing else to install or sign up for removes the single biggest reason feedback gets delayed: friction before the reviewer even gets to watch the video.

Approval needs to be a state, not an assumption

"I think they're fine with it since nobody said anything" is how wrong cuts ship. An explicit approve action — a button the reviewer presses that changes the project's status and notifies the team — replaces silence-as-consent with an actual record of who approved what, and when. It also gives you a clean signal for when a cut is genuinely ready to export, instead of exporting on a guess and re-exporting after the actual feedback shows up a day later.

Threaded replies keep one conversation in one place

Notes generate follow-up questions — "fixed, can you confirm?", "which take do you mean?" Keeping those as replies under the original comment, resolvable once settled, stops a single piece of feedback from spawning a parallel conversation in email or chat that the rest of the team doesn't see.

What this looks like end to end

Put together, a review step that actually works has four properties: it opens on a link with no account required, comments are pinned to an exact timestamp on an exact cut, replies stay threaded and resolvable, and approval is an explicit, recorded action rather than an assumed one.

That's the review flow built into CineGen: a shareable link opens the cut directly, reviewers leave timestamped comments and replies without creating an account, and a dedicated approve action marks the project ready — all without leaving the production to route through email or a separate review tool.