The privacy promise: what we never send to a third-party

Clients rarely ask us about data handling before they hire us, and they should. A film studio ends up holding some of the most sensitive material a company owns: unreleased products on a bench, faces of people who have not signed anything yet, a founder saying the honest version before the polished one. Losing a frame of that early is not a technical incident. It is a broken trust, and trust is the only thing a studio actually sells.

So we keep a list: an unglamorous, continually edited list of every place a client's material could leak. Every new tool, every new step in the pipeline, gets added to it and interrogated. Where does this footage physically sit? Who else can reach the bucket it lands in? Does this service upload anything to train on it? When we stop working with a client, what is left behind, and where? The list is never finished, because the pipeline is never finished, and a promise you stop re-checking is just a slogan.

The decisions that come out of that list are mostly about keeping work close. Ingest, edit, and grade happen on machines we control, not on someone else's cloud that reserves the right to inspect what we upload. When a tool genuinely earns its place in the pipeline, we prefer the version that runs locally over the one that ships every frame to a server we cannot see inside. It is slower to set up and it is the right trade, because the alternative is a terms-of-service page quietly deciding what happens to a client's unreleased work.

The hardest leaks are the boring ones: the ones nobody designed and everybody has done. A preview link with no expiry, forwarded twice. A convenience upload to get a quick render, forgotten. A laptop with a project on the desktop, taken to a café. None of these are exotic and all of them are how footage actually gets out. So the promise is not really about exotic threats; it is about closing the ordinary doors, deliberately, and checking they stayed shut.

We do not pretend this is perfect, and we would distrust anyone who told you theirs was. Security is a direction, not a destination, and the honest version of the promise is this: we keep the list, we keep shortening the distance between a client's footage and our own hands, and we tell you plainly where the remaining gaps are rather than papering over them. That is the version you can actually hold us to, and holding us to it is the whole point.