How to show a producer or client your selects when they don't have the NLE open

StoryFolder — 2026-09-02

Last updated: 2 September 2026.

You have watched down the footage, pulled the good moments into a selects sequence, and now a producer wants to see what you are working with. They do not have the NLE open. They are not coming to the suite. So you render the sequence to a file, upload it, and send a link to forty minutes of video that only makes sense if the person watches it end to end in the order you happened to lay it out.

There is another way to hand that over: render the reel, import it into StoryFolder, heart the shots you are willing to show, and publish a link the client opens in a browser with no account. They get numbered thumbnails they can scroll, in three layouts, with the labels you created (custom fields are Pro) and the transcript you chose to include. They reply with the numbers.

StoryFolder is not a review-and-approval platform. The published page has no comments, no ticks, no approvals, no search box, and no synced playback. For a board imported from a local .mov there is no video player on it at all. The picks come back in an email or a message, the way they did before, and nothing goes back to your NLE as an FCPXML, XML, EDL or AAF. What changes is the artefact the client is looking at while they decide.

Why does a flat selects reel make the client do the editor's navigation work?

A rendered reel keeps playback and throws away the index. Everything you knew about that footage while you were building the sequence lives in the NLE's bin and in your head: which take this is, who is speaking, where it was shot, whether it is cleared. None of it survives the render. What arrives at the other end is a picture and a clock.

Frame.io's own documentation states the mechanism plainly: content metadata does not live with the file, it lives in an NLE or a media asset management system, and copying the media does not bring the logging along with it. That is why a client email comes back saying "the one with the guy in the hard hat, about eleven minutes in" instead of a shot number. They have no other handle to grab.

The cost lands on the reviewer, and it scales with your runtime. To compare take three against take seven in a linear reel, they have to remember take three while they scrub to take seven, then scrub back. On a grid they look at both at once. Posting to r/editors in March 2022, u/adnelik described the current best answer:

"Above and beyond, sometimes the producer or creative director will want to see what we are working with, I'll upload the Selects timeline to Frame.io and they can comment on takes they like. With a linked timeline I can then easily grab what they prefer."

That is the workflow working as well as it currently can, and it is still one flat video for a decision that is about many separate options. The edit suite used to absorb this problem, because you sat next to the person and drove. u/Martian_Martian32 put the state of that in r/documentaryfilmmaking in August 2026: "You could make the argument for the client to just come to the editing bay and watch it back but today, that's not realistic."

Why is selects review closer to photo proofing than video approval?

Because the question is which options do we want, and photography has built a whole software category around that question.

A wedding or commercial photographer finishes a shoot and sends a gallery. The client opens a few hundred frames in a browser, scrolls, compares, and marks the ones they want. ShootProof, Pixieset, PASS, Picflow and Pic-Time are all built around that single act. You would not deliver those frames as a slideshow video and ask the client to call out timestamps.

Video review software answers a different question. Frame.io, Dropbox Replay, ftrack Review, Filestage and Wipster all assume a cut exists and ask what should change in it: a comment pinned to 00:04:17, a version compared against the previous one, an approval on the whole. That is the right shape for a rough cut going to a client for notes. It is the wrong shape for forty candidate moments that have not been assembled into anything yet.

Selects review sits between the two, and video has no mature convention for it. The closest existing tools present files. Frame.io's Grid view and iconik's collections both give you tiles, and each tile is a whole asset. To show a client forty selects as forty browsable items in either of them, you first have to export forty discrete media files out of your sequence. The in-and-out ranges you already marked are not something they ingest.

This is where StoryFolder does the useful half and the honest limit matters. Detecting shots from the rendered reel gives you the gallery: the clips in the string become individually thumbnailed, numbered, labelled items, and the client scrolls a wall of them instead of scrubbing a timeline. The defining act of a proofing gallery is the client ticking the frames they want, and the published board has no tick. We have built the gallery; the picking still happens in an email.

What should the client actually receive?

A reduced set, numbered, with only the labels the decision needs.

The reduction is the part editors skip, and it is the same judgement the assistant-editor tradition already encodes: the FSU Film Handbook draws the line between scene stringouts, which stay internal, and dailies stringouts, which are exported for production review. One of those is for you and one is for other people, and they are not the same cut. In a 2024 walkthrough of delivering documentary interview dailies, Joshua Kirk described taking each interview down to only the material he would be comfortable showing a client, with crew chatter and dead air removed before anything went out, and called the result a breakdown or a selects reel.

So: cut the reel down before you render it, or heart only the client-safe shots after you import it. Then decide what travels with each thumbnail. A Location, a Take, a speaker name and a line of transcript is usually enough for someone to say "that one". Your internal Usable? checkbox and your notes about the audio problem in take four probably should not go, and the control for that is coarse: "Include notes & data" publishes every shot field that has a value, or none of them. There is no per-field tick list on a publish. Exports do honour a field selection, which is a different mechanism with different behaviour, so do not reason from one to the other.

How does a stringout become a browsable shot grid?

Drag the rendered file in. StoryFolder watches for the moment the picture changes and cuts the video into shots there. Hard cuts come out clean; a dissolve or a slow fade is the case it misses, which is what step one below is for. Every shot gets a thumbnail and a place in the grid, in timeline order. On a long reel that pass takes a while and it scales with duration, so start it and go and do something else.

Then, in order:

1. Check the boundaries. Scroll the board rather than watching it. A wrong cut is visible as a thumbnail, and split or join it where you see one; changing detection sensitivity re-runs the pass and keeps every note, split and join you have already made, because your metadata is keyed to frame numbers rather than baked into the shot list.
2. Heart the shots you will show. This is a click on the card. The heart is free and it is the mechanism that matters, for a reason in step 5.
3. Add the labels the client needs. Create the fields you want and write values across a whole selection in one gesture. Custom fields are a Pro feature; free boards ship a Tags field and twelve text fields written for someone studying a film, which is not this job.
4. Narrow while you work. Type into the board search and it matches your text, dropdown, tag and number values plus every transcript segment overlapping a shot, and filter chips stack on top in the field's own words: Rating is at least 4. One precedence rule catches people out: a typed query overrides the favourites-only and show-hidden toggles. The sibling article on turning a stringout into a searchable shot log carries the search behaviour and the field mechanics in full.
5. Publish. And here is the rule that decides step 2: only the heart and the hidden flag narrow what gets published. Your search query does not. Your rating filter does not. You can stare at nine four-star shots on screen, publish, and send the client all 240.

A real stringout does not fit on the free tier: a free board caps at 12 shots, and the cap applies before anything else, so plan on Pro for this workflow.

What can the client do on the shared page?

They open a URL with no account and no software, pick one of three layouts — Storyboard, Thumbnails, Shot List — and read. Each shot is numbered, with a thumbnail, and in the Storyboard and Shot List layouts every metadata label and value you published plus a transcript block. That is the whole interaction.

They cannot search it, filter it, comment on it, approve anything, mark a pick, or read a timecode off it. They cannot see which shots you hearted; the server strips each shot's internal state before serving the page. A board built from a local .mov has no video player on it, so the thumbnail is what they get. A YouTube-sourced board embeds the player.

Three access levels, in the share popover: Public, Unlisted and Password. Unlisted is not authenticated. Anyone holding the URL can open it, and the only thing protecting it is that the URL is not published anywhere and /b/ links are excluded from crawlers. Password is genuinely gated, stored as a hash and checked server-side, and it is a Pro feature. Whichever you pick, open the link in a signed-out private window before you send it. Thirty seconds, and it is the only way to see what the client sees rather than what your logged-in browser shows you.

Republishing after you change the board reuses the same URL. You do not resend a link every time you add a shot or fix a label, and an old email keeps working.

How do the picks get back to the editor?

They type numbers at you. Ask for them.

The shots on the published page are numbered and stable, so the instruction in your email is one line: reply with the numbers you want — for example, 12, 18, 31. That is a shared vocabulary between two people looking at the same page, which is more than a rendered reel gives you. Do not sell it as an approval workflow.

When the list comes back, heart those shots and take one of two routes out. Export clips, which writes one real MP4 per shot cut from the original source, and you drop the folder into a bin. Or export the shot list, which writes both Shot List.csv and Shot List.xlsx with your chosen field columns and per-shot timings; that same sibling article has the full column list.

Read those timings as elapsed from the first frame of the file you imported rather than the source's own timecode, so work from the exact First Frame and Last Frame integers.

Use a review-and-approval tool when the job is notes on a cut

If what you need is a comment pinned to a frame, a version stacked against the previous one, a sign-off you can point at later, or a session where you and the client watch in sync, use a tool built for that. Frame.io, ftrack Review, Dropbox Replay and Filestage all do it, and StoryFolder does none of it. Check their current pricing at the source; this space moves.

Use a published StoryFolder board when the job is to put a set of shot options in front of someone who is not in post, and to refer to them afterwards by number and by label.

FAQ

Is an Unlisted selects board password protected? No. Anyone with the URL can open an Unlisted board. Password is the access level with an actual gate on it, and it is a Pro feature.

Will my search query trim the board before it publishes? Yes. A publish and an export both take the shots your current query and filter chips leave standing, and the favourite and hidden flags narrow them as well.

Can the client see which shots I hearted? No. The server deletes each shot's internal state, including favourite and hidden, before it serves the page.

Does republishing give the client a new link? No. The board keeps its id, so a republish updates the same URL and the link you already sent keeps working.

Can the client play the video from a board I made from a local .mov? No. The published page embeds a player only for boards whose source was a YouTube URL. A local-file board shows thumbnails.

Can I password-protect a selects link on the free plan? No. Public and Unlisted links are free; password-protected links are Pro.

Does the shared page collect the client's picks? No. There is no tick, no comment field and no approval on it. The picks arrive however the client normally messages you, and you heart them by hand.

Will the shot list export match back to my source timecode? No. Timecodes are elapsed from the start of the imported file, so use the First Frame and Last Frame integers if you need exact positions.

Related help pages

• Import a local stringout or selects reel
• Heart the shots you are willing to show
• Search a board
• Publish and update a shared board
• Choose Public, Unlisted or Password access
• Export one MP4 per shot
• Export the shot list as CSV and XLSX

← All articles