What a client asks before it ships
Who holds the rights, does the file carry a mark, can it run as paid media, and does the permission belong to the account that exported it. These four arrive in nearly every review, and none of them can be answered from the file itself. As of 2026-09-12.
| Question | Answered by |
|---|---|
| Can it run as paid media? | The platform, not the generator |
| Does the file carry a mark? | Inspecting the delivered file |
| What went in? | The production's own input list |
| Who holds the rights? | The account and plan that produced it |
Inclusion rule. Questions that recur in nearly every client review of generated material. Order. Alphabetical by question.
1Who holds what, and in whose account
Permissions attach to an account and a plan, not to a file. If a freelancer exported the material under their own subscription, the answer to what a client may do with it runs through that subscription and whatever was agreed with the freelancer.
Deciding whose account produces the material is therefore a commercial decision taken before production rather than a detail settled afterwards. It is also the question most often discovered late.
2Whether the file carries a mark
A visible mark, an embedded signal or an attached manifest are three different things and a file can carry any combination. Whether one is present is answerable only by inspecting the delivered file, after any platform transcode.
Where removal is a paid step, it belongs in the budget rather than in the final week. Where it is not offered, that is an answer too and one worth having in writing before the work begins.
3Paid media asks more than organic
Running material as an ad usually brings a second layer of requirements from the platform rather than from the generator, and platforms are more exacting about generated material in paid placements than in organic posts.
Knowing at the brief stage whether the work will be boosted changes which questions need answers. Retrofitting a clearance after a campaign is planned is where schedules break.
4Inputs are half the question
What was fed in matters as much as what came out: reference images, a likeness, a logo, music, a script somebody else wrote. A vendor's permissive terms say nothing about material that was not the user's to supply.
Listing the inputs per deliverable, with where each came from, answers a class of question that no terms page can. It is also the list a client's own reviewers will ask for.
5Write the answers once, reuse them
These four questions recur on every project, and the answers change slowly. A short standing note per tool — plan, what the terms say, whether output is marked, what was agreed — turns a review into a lookup.
Keep it dated and keep the source link. An undated note is the thing everyone stops trusting the first time a vendor changes a page.
6Where the timeline usually breaks
Clearance questions surface at the end because that is when someone outside the production reads the work. The cost of answering them then is a delayed delivery; the cost of answering them at the brief is an afternoon.
Nothing about generated material makes this worse in principle. What makes it worse in practice is that the permissions live on pages that change and are rarely recorded when relied on.
7A short pre-flight
Which account and plan produced it. What the terms said on that date, quoted. Whether the delivered file carries a mark. Whether it will run as paid media. What went in, and from where. Who signed off.
Six lines per deliverable. They are boring to write and they are the entire difference between a review that takes ten minutes and one that takes a week.
8The two questions that are not about the tool at all
Whether a recognisable person appears, and whether a trademark is visible in frame. Both are decided by what is on screen rather than by how it was made, and both are outside every generator's terms.
They belong on the pre-flight because they are cheap to catch in a still and expensive to catch after delivery. A quick look at each frame that includes a face, a logo or a building is the whole check.
9Version the sign-off, not just the file
Deliverables get revised, and a clearance attaches to a specific cut. A sign-off recorded against a version number, with the date, survives a revision; one recorded against a project name does not.
Where a later cut changes inputs — a new reference image, a different track — the pre-flight is worth rerunning rather than inheriting. Most of it is a lookup by then, so the cost is small.
10Scope of this page
This is production practice, not a reading of anyone's terms and not advice about any particular deliverable. What each product states about commercial use sits in the register beside its source page and a check date.
Where the answer matters commercially, the register is a starting point for the conversation rather than the end of it.
11Where the vendor statements are kept
The mechanics above apply to anyone. What a given vendor has committed to in writing is held on the register instead, each line with the plan page it came from and the date it was checked.
- The rights register — what each product's own pages state, with dates
An explainer, not an entry in the register. Vendor statements are held, with their sources, on commercial use, and nothing on this page is legal advice. Related: Licence vs ownership, The production file.
12What the output is for
Alongside the terms behind “Clearing a deliverable”, SceneMixer's guides describe the work itself this way:
Every character, scene and prop card can carry a short list of the other names your script uses for the same thing.
SceneMixer, Also Called: Nicknames, Old Names, and How the Storyboard Knows Who Is Who (read 2026-10-13)
The music runs across the end card and comes to an end with the film.
SceneMixer, Where the Music in an Ad Video Comes From — “Does the end card have music?” (read 2026-10-13)