The live form

A live review gives you a judge's response in real time on a call: a conversation, not a finished file, with room to correct course and less polish than a clip. Whether anything is recorded depends on the judge, so you may leave with a recording or with nothing at all.

How it actually runs

A live session is booked for a window rather than commissioned as a fixed deliverable. You show up, share whatever material you agreed to share, and the judge responds in real time - reacting, asking a clarifying question if your brief left one open, moving through register live instead of performing it once for a camera and stopping.

That real-time quality is the whole difference. A recorded review is one take that either landed or did not; a live one can correct course mid-session if the judge misreads what you wanted, because you are there to say so. It is closer to being in the room with someone than any other form gets, and for buyers who want that specifically, nothing else substitutes.

What is and is not kept

This varies by judge and platform, and it is worth confirming before you book rather than assuming. Some live sessions are recorded and the recording becomes yours afterward, effectively a clip made live instead of made alone. Others are genuinely ephemeral - nothing is kept, the session happens and then it is over, which some buyers specifically prefer because it leaves nothing behind to manage or delete later. Where a recording is kept and UK data protection law applies, the ICO's storage limitation guidance is blunt: "You must not keep personal data for longer than you need it."

Ask which one you are booking before the call, not during it. A judge who does not record by default is not being difficult; ephemeral is a legitimate and fairly common choice, and treating it as an oversight rather than a policy is a fast way to make a bad first impression.

How interaction changes the register

A recorded register is written and performed once, aimed at whoever eventually watches. A live register is aimed at you specifically, in the moment, and it can respond to your reactions as they happen - a laugh, a pause, a follow-up question - in a way nothing recorded can. Voice alone carries more than people expect: in Schroeder and Epley's 2015 study, employers who heard a candidate's pitch rated the candidate's intellect more favourably than employers who read the same pitch. That makes live sessions feel more personal to most buyers, and it is also why they are harder for a judge to sustain for long: performing a register live, with no edit and no second take, is a different kind of effort than recording one clip and moving to the next request.

It also means a live session can drift if you let it. A recorded review has a fixed shape because it is made once and delivered; a live one can wander toward conversation if neither side steers it back, which is worth knowing if what you actually wanted was a review and not an open-ended chat.

What to prepare

Send whatever material you would send for a recorded review, on the same schedule - a judge should not be seeing your photos for the first time live, same as they should not be recorded for the first time either: a quote and an agreement come first. Have your brief ready in the same shape it would take for a clip - register, length in mind, one specific you want addressed - because live does not remove the need for a brief, it just lets you adjust it out loud if the judge asks.

Whether it is what you want

If what appeals to you is presence and real-time response, live delivers more of both than a recorded clip does, at the cost of polish, of a fixed take you can rewatch exactly, and sometimes of any file at all. Choosing between the recorded forms is a separate question from choosing live over recorded, and it is worth working out which axis actually matters to you before you book: presence versus detail is one decision, live versus recorded is another. The reasons a judge chooses to offer live sessions, and what changes for them on their side, are covered separately if you are curious what you are asking of them by booking one. For a sense of how automated tools compare on the presence question at the opposite extreme, a purely automated score offers none of this by design, and what a live session cannot answer - a reliable, repeatable read - is still a job for something consistent rather than a person, live or otherwise. Measuring anything you want stated as a number belongs to a tape either way, live call or not. Booking through a platform that handles scheduling and payment the same way it handles recorded commissions is what keeps a live session as straightforward as any other order.