The 5 Worst Ways Clients Send Video Revisions (Ranked)

Last updated: May 2026

A client recently sent me a 10-minute voice note describing changes to a 90-second commercial.

I listened to it twice. I made notes. I still got most of it wrong, because at minute six he changed his mind about something in minute two and I couldn't find which thing.

This isn't unusual. Anyone who edits video for clients can tell you the same story with a different prop. The voice note. The Zoom. The email that says "the bit at like 14 seconds." Every working editor has a graveyard of these.

So I started keeping a list. Five years of client revisions, roughly ranked by how much they made me want to walk into the sea. Counting down.

5. The "I'll send you my notes in a sec" that arrives 11 days later

The lowest entry on this list, because at least the notes eventually exist.

You deliver the cut Tuesday morning. Client says they'll send notes "in a sec." You wait. You spin up another project to fill the time. By Friday, you've moved on emotionally. The following Wednesday at 9:47 PM, an email arrives. Subject line: "notes!" Body: 2,400 words.

By the time their notes show up, you've forgotten what was in V1. You re-watch your own cut. You cross-reference their email. Half their notes are now obsolete because of decisions you made on the other project you started while waiting. The note-receiving process becomes its own project.

The painful part isn't the delay. It's that you can't budget for it. The client thinks they're being thoughtful. You think you have a hole in your schedule. Both are wrong.

4. The Zoom call where nobody hits record

The client says, "Let's hop on a quick call so I can walk you through it." Famous last words.

What follows is 47 minutes of: "And then right around here — wait, can you scrub back? — yeah, here, no, a little earlier — okay this part, I think the cut feels a bit off? Maybe? What do you think?" They're talking faster than you can write. You're nodding. You're saying "got it." You haven't gotten any of it.

The call ends. You stare at your notes. They read like a transcript of a stroke. "Logo bigger??? color scene 4 maybe?? music vibe somewhere middle ish."

The kicker: nobody hit record. Not them, not you. You both showed up to a 47-minute revision call planning to remember it from memory, and now nobody has the receipts. So either (a) you ask them to send written notes anyway — defeating the entire purpose of the call — or (b) you interpret your stroke-notes and pray.

The cruelty is that this almost feels like good client communication. Everyone wanted to be helpful. The format was just architecturally broken for getting work done — and neither of you noticed until it was too late.

3. The WhatsApp message with "fix this" and a blurry photo

Surprisingly common. Wildly unhelpful.

The client sends you a WhatsApp. The message reads, in its entirety: "fix this." Attached is a slightly out-of-focus photo of a monitor — their monitor — with what appears to be a paused frame from your cut on it. The photo was taken at an angle.

You open it on your phone. You squint. You can sort of see the frame. Your own work, you made it. What you cannot see is: what about it needs fixing. The audio? The color? Was something on screen the client didn't want? Are they wondering if you can replace it with B-roll?

You reply: "Hi! Could you let me know what specifically you'd like changed?"

They reply, eight hours later: "you know just like the vibe of it"

You stare at the wall.

The phone-camera-of-a-monitor photo is its own particular violence. There is, somewhere in the world, a perfectly clean digital file of that exact frame. The client has access to it. They're literally watching it. They could screenshot it. Instead, they took a photo of their monitor with their phone, like a parent showing a grandchild a picture of the dog. And then they sent it to you, the professional, to fix the vibe.

2. The client who wants to revise via text message

This is where things get philosophically uncomfortable.

A WhatsApp arrives at 11:47 PM: "hey can u shorten the intro a bit"

Then, three minutes later: "actually never mind keep it"

Then, the next morning at 7:14 AM: "actually shorten it"

Then, that afternoon, in a separate thread: "the music in the second half feels off can u change it"

By Thursday, your revision notes are scattered across 14 messages, two different threads, one voice note, and a single email. None of them have timestamps relative to the video. None of them reference a version. Some of them contradict each other.

There is no version of this where you successfully complete all the revisions, because some of them no longer apply but you don't know which ones, and the client has long since lost track too. Whatever you deliver, they'll say "but I asked for X" and you'll have to scroll back through 14 texts to find that they did, indeed, ask for X — but they also asked for not-X two messages later, and you somehow have to tell them this without it becoming a fight.

You start losing sleep.

1. The 10-minute voice note

We're back where we started.

Voice notes are the worst format for video revisions for a reason most clients never think about: video editing is fundamentally a visual craft, and voice notes contain zero visual reference. There's no timestamp. No screenshot. No frame. Just a person describing, with their voice, things they're remembering from a video they watched two hours ago.

A typical 10-minute voice note for a 90-second commercial contains, in approximate proportions:

• 90 seconds of useful actionable feedback
• 4 minutes of restating the same feedback in different words
• 1 minute of "uhhhh" and "soooo" and "what's that thing you do"
• 30 seconds of conclusion that contradicts the opening

You listen to it. You take notes. You realize the client referred to "the bit with the thing" four separate times and meant a different bit each time. You play it again. You give up on figuring out which "thing" they meant. You make a guess and pray.

The cruelest part: voice notes are increasing. Younger clients prefer them. Older clients are catching on. The format is winning.

This is, more than any other reason, why I built VidiView. My clients don't send voice notes anymore. They click on the frame they're commenting about. The comment lives at that timecode forever. I read it. I fix it. I move on.

It is, genuinely, the single biggest workflow improvement of the last five years of my editing life.

What this list is actually about

If you've read this far and nodded at all five — or worse, recognized specific clients in specific entries — the problem isn't that your clients are uniquely bad. It's that the tools you use to communicate with them about video are not designed for video.

Email is a text format. WhatsApp is a text format. Voice notes are an audio format. Zoom calls are an ephemeral format. None of them lets your client point at the actual frame and say this thing, here.

That's the entire problem. Not the clients. The format mismatch.

If your inbox looks like the list above, there's a better way. Any tool that lets clients leave timestamped, frame-pinned comments will fix 90% of these patterns overnight. The specific tool matters less than the format.

I built VidiView — the free tier is genuinely usable if you want to try it on a real project — but anything that fits your workflow will do the job. If you're shopping around, here's an honest comparison of the main options.