EDITLOCK How a video agency should organize client review (projects, folders, and who sees what)
One shared Drive, every client's footage in it, and a prayer that nobody opens the wrong folder. Here's how to run review across multiple clients so each one only ever sees their own work — and your team sees all of it.
If you run a video agency, your review problem isn’t one client — it’s ten at once. The fix is a structure where each client’s work lives in its own space, your team can move across all of them, and a reviewer only ever sees the project they were invited to — not the shared mess behind it. Get that wrong and you’re one misdirected link away from showing Client A the cut you made for Client B.
A solo editor can get away with a loose pile of Drive links. An agency can’t. The moment you have multiple clients, multiple editors, and work in flight on all of them, “where is the current cut and who’s allowed to see it” becomes the actual job.
The mess most agencies are stuck in
Here’s the setup that works for the first two clients and quietly breaks at the fifth:
- One shared Drive for everything. Every client’s footage sits in the same account, separated only by folder names that someone has to remember. Access is all-or-nothing — if you share a folder, the client can often navigate up a level into the rest.
- Review notes scattered per client. This client sends timestamps on WhatsApp, that one replies in email, a third leaves comments in a Google Doc. There’s no single place to see “what’s outstanding across all our projects right now.”
- No idea who touched what. When an editor leaves or a freelancer wraps up, you can’t cleanly cut their access to just their projects — because there were never really “projects,” just folders.
- Clients see your plumbing. The review page looks like a generic file tool, with another company’s branding on it, which isn’t the impression a paying client should get.
None of this is a storage problem. It’s an organization and access problem — and it compounds with every new client you win.
Give every client their own project
The first move is to stop thinking in folders and start thinking in projects, one per client (or per client engagement):
- One project per client. Each project is a sealed container — its own uploads, its own versions, its own review history. Nothing leaks between them because they’re genuinely separate, not just named differently.
- Folders inside, for structure. Within a client’s project, use folders to split work the way the engagement actually runs — by deliverable, by month, by campaign — so a long-running client doesn’t become one endless scroll.
- A cover image so your team finds the right one fast. When you’ve got a dozen projects, a cover image per client beats reading a list of names every time.
Now “the Diwali cut for the skincare brand” has one obvious home, and your team stops hunting.
Control who sees what — precisely
This is the part a shared Drive can’t do well, and it’s where agencies get burned:
- Your team moves across everything. Invite your editors and managers to the workspace with a role that fits what they do — full access for leads, edit access for editors — so your side sees all projects.
- Clients see only their project. A reviewer invited to one client’s project can’t see any other client’s work. If you need to lock things down further, restricted projects and restricted folders let you limit visibility even within your own team — useful for an NDA client or an unreleased campaign.
- One reviewer link, no account. The client opens their review page in the browser with nothing to install and no login — but that link only ever reaches their project, never the workspace behind it.
- Cut access cleanly when someone leaves. When a freelancer wraps or a client engagement ends, you remove them and that’s it — no orphaned folder shares you forgot about six months ago.
Make the client-facing side look like yours
A client reviewing a cut should feel like they’re inside your agency’s process, not a third party’s tool:
- Put your brand on the review page. Branded guest pages let the client see your agency’s name and look while they review — not a generic file-sharing interface with someone else’s logo.
- Keep the actual review tight. The client pins notes to the exact second, approves when it’s ready, and if more than one stakeholder is reviewing, you route notes with @mentions instead of forwarding threads around.
- Close out old shares. When a project ships, stop the shares so old links don’t stay live forever.
Why per-seat pricing punishes agencies most
Agencies feel per-seat billing harder than anyone, because an agency is all seats: every editor, every manager, every client contact, every one-off stakeholder on a campaign. On a tool that charges per person, you’re taxed for the exact thing an agency does — bring lots of people to lots of projects — so you start rationing who gets an account to keep the bill from ballooning. That’s backwards: the person with the note is the person who should be able to leave it.
Editlock is priced on storage, not people. Unlimited team members and unlimited client reviewers sit under one flat ₹ price, and the only thing that grows your cost is how much footage you keep across all your clients. For an agency running ten projects at once, that’s the right axis — your bill tracks the work you’re storing, not how many humans need to look at it.
If your client review is currently a shared Drive and a lot of hoping, start on the free plan, set up one real client as a project, and see how much calmer the next round of notes feels.