SceneNote review: a free video review and approval tool with timecoded comments

SceneNote was built by Kiril Dobrev and Bryn North; in late July 2026 it launched on Product Hunt, collected around 109 upvotes, and finished 12th for the day. The niche is well established: video feedback tools have existed for years, but almost all of them are paid and require uploading your video to their servers.

SceneNote took a different route: it does not host video at all. You paste a link to YouTube, Vimeo, or Dropbox, or a direct URL to an MP4/MP3 file (audio up to 50 MB), the service builds a comment layer on top of the player, and you share the project link. That is exactly why it is completely free: no storage or bandwidth costs means no pricing tiers.

The feature set covers the full feedback-collection cycle:

• Timecoded comments – tied to an exact moment or a range ("from 0:12 to 0:18 the music drowns out the voice"). A note stops being "somewhere in the middle".
• Drawn annotations on the frame – circling a misplaced logo is faster than describing its position in words.
• Voice notes with automatic transcription – the client dictates a note, the service turns it into text. The habit of sending voice messages survives, and the editor gets a readable list.
• Tasks from feedback, statuses, and threads – a comment becomes a task, gets discussed in a thread, and gets closed. You can see what is already fixed and what is still open.
• Versions – upload v2, collect separate feedback on it, and the note history for each version stays unmixed.

A separate word on versions: in Frame.io version comparison and stacked feedback belong to the paid tiers, while here it is free. For the typical "draft, feedback, v2, final" cycle this is exactly the mechanic messengers lack: there the second cut just shows up in the chat as a new file, and nobody remembers which notes belonged to which version.

The most underrated part of tools like this is not collecting the notes but delivering them to the editor. SceneNote exports notes to CSV or EDL with a frame rate of your choice, and in Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve, or Final Cut Pro they appear as markers directly on the timeline – at the exact points the comments are tied to.

In practice this removes an entire manual step: the editor no longer copies notes out of chat threads into the project or scrubs through the video hunting for "that spot with the logo". Open the timeline – the markers are already there. The longer the video and the more notes, the bigger the saving.

An honest comparison across the three typical ways teams collect feedback today:

Frame.io remains the standard for studios with heavy volume: its own hosting, Adobe integration, access control, storage guarantees. But for a marketing team that signs off a few videos a month with a contractor and a manager, paying for reviewer seats is usually overkill – a free layer on top of a link covers the core pain.

A tool by itself does not fix a process – that is a general rule I wrote about in the article on AI tools for marketers: without an owner and a set of rules, any service stays a toy. For video approval, the working setup looks like this:

1. 01The editor posts a draft to Vimeo, YouTube (unlisted link), or Dropbox and creates a project in SceneNote.
2. 02The link goes to everyone who signs off – the client, the manager, the marketer. One rule: feedback lives only in SceneNote, comments in chats are not accepted.
3. 03A feedback deadline – 24 hours, for example. Range comments and annotations instead of "something is off in the middle".
4. 04The editor exports an EDL, gets markers on the timeline, and closes the notes as tasks with statuses.
5. 05The second cut is uploaded as v2 – its feedback is collected separately, and old notes never mix with new ones.

Note that the point here is not the tool but the rule that feedback lives in one place. SceneNote simply makes that rule convenient enough that people follow it. If you want to build the whole content pipeline – from script generation to approval and publishing – that is a system-level job, the kind Matveo does: there video approval becomes one stage of the pipeline instead of a separate battle in messengers. The next step for such a system is automating the routine stages with agents, which I cover in the article on AI agents in marketing.

SceneNote being free is a consequence of its architecture, and that comes at a price:

• Projects are auto-deleted after 45 days of inactivity. For an active approval cycle that is fine, but the service cannot serve as an archive of feedback – export the final lists to CSV and keep them on your side.
• Player quality depends on the source platform. The service shows whatever YouTube, Vimeo, or Dropbox serves: the source's bitrate, lag, and restrictions carry over into playback.
• No accounts means no personalization. No history of your projects, no team settings, no roles or access rights. Access to a project equals knowing the link, so confidential material should go through unlisted links on the source platform.
• Audio is limited to 50 MB when uploaded as a direct file.

A separate question is the durability of the service itself. It is a young product from two developers with no visible monetization model; I would not rely on it as the only store of feedback history. Using it as the working approval layer with exported results – yes; as an archive – no.