Questions, answered straight

Those are services: your media uploads to their servers, everyone needs an account, and you rent access monthly. ReviewDeck is a tool: your media stays in your folders on drives you already own, nobody needs an account, and the app is yours once installed. Reviews travel as ordinary files you send however you already talk to people.

Yes - that's where it comes from. ReviewDeck is made by Adam Broder, a cinematic artist and trailer editor with a decade in games, and shaped around the reviews game teams actually run: trailer cuts, gameplay captures, key art and 3D assets. It also fits how studios already work. The library lives on your own drives behind your own permissions, so an unannounced title never touches a third-party server, and there's no per-seat subscription to get signed off.

It isn't game-only, though. If you work in film, motion design or archviz, everything works exactly the same way.

The whole app is free for everyone, solo or a team on a shared drive: reviewing, sending, collecting notes, 3D, all of it. The catch, such as it is: files you send out carry a small "Made with ReviewDeck" note. The Team and Studio licences are a one-off payment and get the studio extras: your own branding on outgoing reviews, watermarks, admin tools for activity and sign-off tracking, and, coming in an update, a white-label review portal on your own domain. Some future features will be paid-only too. The free app stays free. That's the deal.

No. There is no ReviewDeck server to upload to. Your media lives in your folders; reviews you send travel through whatever channel you choose (email, chat, a shared drive). Even the browser portal works entirely on the reviewer's device. After the page loads it is blocked from all network access, which you can verify in the browser's network tab. Full details in the privacy policy.

Windows 10 and up, and Mac: Apple silicon Macs (M1 and later) on macOS 13 Ventura or newer (Intel Macs aren't supported yet). One shared library works from a Mac and a PC at once. Reviewers don't need the app at all: the browser portal works on anything with a modern browser, including phones.

Video, stills, image sequences, audio and 3D. Stills: PNG, JPG, TIFF, WebP and BMP. A folder of numbered frames (EXR, PNG, TIFF and the rest) imports as one review at the frame rate you choose. Audio (WAV, MP3, FLAC, AIFF and more) reviews on its waveform. Video is baked into quality tiers, so playback is instant even off a network drive over WiFi. 3D meshes and Gaussian splat captures open in the same app, with notes that remember the exact camera view.

Meshes: glTF/GLB, FBX, OBJ, COLLADA, PLY, STL and 3MF. Everything converts to one clean format at import, with rigs, animation and materials preserved where the source carries them, and units and axes normalised so a Maya export and a Blender export sit the same way up at the same size.

Gaussian splat captures open natively too: PLY, SPZ, SPLAT, KSPLAT and SOG. A scan of a set, a prop or a location reviews the same way a mesh does.

Fly or orbit the asset, then mark it up with a grease pencil that draws in real 3D space: on a placement plane you push through the scene, directly on the surface, or flat on the lens like a 2D note. Strokes live in the scene, so you can orbit around your own drawing.

Beyond the pen: drop motion trails on a rigged character to talk about movement, isolate or hide named parts, and switch shading (clay, wireframe, an AO form pass and more) and lighting to interrogate the surface. Animated assets get the same frame-accurate transport as video, so a note lands on the exact frame of the exact move.

Every note bakes the exact camera view you were looking from when you added it, along with the view state that mattered (shading mode, active trails). Selecting a note flies the viewport straight back there, so "this bit, from this angle" survives the trip to another machine. Text-only notes carry the view too; no drawing required.

Yes. The portal ships the full viewer: orbit and fly, the 3D grease pencil, trails, parts, all of it, and phones orbit with a finger. Their 3D notes come back in the same feedback file as everything else and land in your library with the camera views intact. Very large splat captures are happiest on a computer.

A single .rdeck file containing the media, and everything needed to leave frame-accurate notes and drawings. They open it at portal.reviewdeck.app in any browser (phone or computer, nothing installs) or with the free desktop app. Step-by-step for reviewers: reviewdeck.app/open.

When they finish, they click Send feedback and return the saved file on the same channel the review arrived on. You click Import feedback in your library and ReviewDeck files every note, including their drawings, to the right review automatically, even if you sent several pieces in one package.

Worth knowing: their notes live only on their device until they send that file back. Nothing syncs behind the scenes, so a reviewer who finishes but never returns the file has sent you nothing. The covering note ReviewDeck writes for you spells this out for them.

Yes: real encryption (AES-256-GCM), not a hidden-field gate. Share the password through a separate channel from the file. Honest warning: a lost password is genuinely unrecoverable, by you or by anyone. That's what makes it worth using.

Nine times out of ten: they're previewing it inside email or a cloud drive instead of opening the downloaded file. Have them save it first, then open it, or just use the portal, which sidesteps all of that. If a .rdeck was re-zipped by another tool along the way, re-export and re-send it.

Point everyone's app at the same library folder on a shared drive or NAS. Everyone's notes merge into one timeline, colour-coded per person, with @mentions, presence, and a "Needs you" view for things waiting on you. No server to set up. The folder is the server.

Yes. Mark the library as cloud-synced when you create it and ReviewDeck adapts (it also detects and flags sync-conflict copies so they never show up as phantom feedback). A proper shared drive or NAS is still the smoothest home for a busy team library.

The same way you already control the drive: folder permissions. A library is ordinary files, so whatever your file server or NAS enforces, ReviewDeck respects. Read-only users can look but not touch. The app deliberately doesn't duplicate your IT's permission system with its own.

A library is plain files and folders. Back it up exactly like the rest of your project data. No export step, no proprietary database to rescue. If you can copy a folder, you can back up ReviewDeck.

The installer is code-signed, but Windows SmartScreen also scores software by download reputation, which new releases earn over time. If you see the warning: keep the file, click More info, then Run anyway. As more people install, the warning disappears on its own.

Yes. Export notes as timeline markers: EDL for DaVinci Resolve, FCPXML for Final Cut Pro, XML for Premiere Pro sequence markers, CSV for spreadsheets, plus a PDF report with each note's frame and drawings for anyone who just wants to read it.

Anonymous feature-usage counts only: event names and numbers, never file names, note text, media or any identifier that could link back to you. There's a notice on first launch and an off switch in Settings. People you send reviews to are never counted at all. The full list of what's counted ships with the app; details in the privacy policy.

A standard zip archive with a readable manifest inside. Deliberately boring. Rename one to .zip and any unzip tool will show you exactly what's in it: your media, thumbnails, and a JSON file describing the review. No proprietary lock-in; your data is inspectable with tools you already have.

If you set a password, unzipping still works but the contents don't: the media, notes and thumbnails are each individually encrypted (AES-256-GCM), so without the password they're unreadable noise. Only the basic metadata (the review's title, the sender's name, file names and sizes) stays visible. Treat the title accordingly if the project itself is secret.

The whole app is free for everyone. Team and Studio are the admin layer on top: flat levels, each a single payment (not per seat, not per year), and all 25% off during early access. Team, £75 once (regular price £100) for up to 10 machines, adds your name and logo on sends, watermarks and admin activity tools; Studio, £300 once (regular £400) for up to 100 machines, adds white-label options: sends that carry only your name, and a self-hosted review portal on your own domain (coming in an update). Studio Unlimited, which is Studio with no machine limit, is coming soon. Moving up later costs only the difference. A machine counts if it opened a licensed library in the last 30 days. One payment covers this version and every update to it. If a 2.0 ever ships it would be an optional upgrade, and I'm still working out what that should cost. What you bought keeps working. Never a subscription. Buy from the pricing section; questions to [email protected].

ReviewDeck is new and moving quickly: updates land often, and what the people using it ask for shapes what comes next. While early access lasts, every Team and Studio level is 25% off. A licence bought now is the same licence as any other: it covers every update to this version and keeps working. Found something odd? Email [email protected].

No. It is one payment per organisation for the level you choose, and it covers every release of that major version - every 1.x update is included. If a 2.0 ever ships it would be an optional paid upgrade, and what you bought keeps working. Moving up a level later (Team to Studio, Studio to Unlimited) costs only the difference: email [email protected] and you get a code worth what you already paid.

Yes. Each licensed copy checks in about once a day with the licence id, an anonymous machine token and a hashed library id (never files, notes or people). Settings → Licence in the app shows how many machines count against your level and when it last checked in. For the list itself - which machines, and when each was last seen - or to remove old ones, email [email protected] and I'll send it or do it the same day.

Nothing stops working - ever. Your reviews, notes, sends and the portal all carry on. What changes is a reminder. First a banner in the app that you can tuck away. Stay over for a month and the banner stays put and a small line appears under your name on the readers and PDFs you send out ("Studio X's licence is due an upgrade"). After three months your branding comes off those sends and the plain "Made with ReviewDeck" badge returns until you move up a level - email [email protected] for a code worth what you already paid, so you pay only the difference. Machines are counted as those that opened a licensed library in the last 30 days; email [email protected] and I'll tell you exactly which ones, remove old workstations and reset the clock the same day (resetting repeatedly in a short time shortens the reminders, so it is a fix, not a loophole). Licensed copies check in with our server about once a day to keep that count; if a copy can't reach us for a month you'll see a "can't confirm this licence" note instead. We never see your files, notes or people - just the licence id, an anonymous machine token and a hashed library id. The free version has no limit at all: a free library with more than ten people sees the same in-app reminder and its sent files carry "Made with ReviewDeck Free - for teams up to 10 people".