Requesting text alongside video

If part of what you want out of a commission is something you can go back and reread, say so before the judge starts, not after the clip lands.

A written summary is a genuinely small ask when it is planned for, and an awkward one when it is bolted on afterwards.

Why timing matters here

A judge who knows from the outset that a summary is wanted can plan the clip around lines that will read well on their own, and can jot the summary as they go rather than transcribing a finished performance after the fact.

A judge asked for one after delivery has to reconstruct it from a clip that was built entirely for the ear, not the page, and the result is often thinner than either side wanted, or comes with an extra charge that would not have applied if it had been part of the original quote.

Put it in the brief, in one line: "I'd also like a short written summary of the main points alongside the clip." That is the whole request.

What to expect back

Not every judge offers this, and it is worth checking rather than assuming. Some will provide two or three sentences capturing the register and the verdict; a few offer a fuller written companion piece as a paid add-on in its own right, closer to a second deliverable than a note.

Neither is a full transcript of the clip word for word, and asking for that specifically is a bigger request than most buyers actually mean - what people usually want is the gist in a form they can reread, not a verbatim record. The W3C's accessibility guidance defines even a basic transcript as "a text version of the speech and non-speech audio information needed to understand the content", which is considerably more than a summary.

Do video reviews come with text? covers this from the judge's side: which formats commonly include something written and why most do not by default.

Why this is worth deciding before you brief

Getting this right at the brief stage is one of the same small decisions covered in writing a request that gets you a good review, where format choices made early consistently produce a better result than the same choices made as an afterthought.

If what you actually want is something closer to a document than a companion note - a longer, structured piece of writing rather than a video with a summary attached - that is a different product entirely, and written reviews are worth reading about before you brief a video and then ask it to become something else.

If the clip already arrived without one

Sometimes the request gets forgotten and the clip lands as video only. At that point, asking is still possible, but it is a second, smaller favour rather than part of the original job, and the honest way to ask reflects that: "would you be able to add a short written summary, I forgot to ask for one up front" rather than treating it as owed.

Some judges will do this for free as a quick courtesy, especially for a repeat client. Others will treat it as a small additional piece of work with its own price, because writing a summary from a finished clip is genuinely more effort than writing one alongside the plan for it. Either answer is reasonable, and neither is a sign the judge did anything wrong the first time.

This is also why it is worth deciding at the brief stage rather than leaving it as a maybe. A maybe that turns into a yes after delivery costs more, in money or in goodwill, than a yes stated up front ever does.

Where this does not apply

None of this touches an automated score, which already arrives as text by default: an algorithmic read is written output from the start, and the summary question only exists because a human review's native form is video.

It also has nothing to do with a numeric leaderboard entry, where a score is the whole deliverable and there is no performance underneath it to summarise.

And if what you are actually after is a number rather than a written impression, a measurement taken with a stated method produces exactly that, with no format decision required at all.

For a general sense of what a commissioned review typically includes before you start adding format requests to it, Rate Cock is a reasonable starting point, since format questions like this one make more sense once the baseline product is clear.