You're in early. Here's how to get your first bid out of Slate.

• Sign in from your invite email and run the setup wizard: name the workspace, pick the departments you bid, set your bid currency.
• Create a project with a three-letter code (e.g. XMN), add a Pack (reel or sequence), then attach a QuickTime. Bid versions live under that QuickTime.
• Load the cut in the Player and drop markers at each VFX shot — or run Auto-markers to read burned-in shot codes off the frame.
• Bind markers to shots individually, or use Auto-match All to bind what exists and create what doesn't.
• Bid the shots by department in day counts. Cost is calculated downstream from your department rates — you never type a price.
• Lock the version when it goes out the door. Locked versions are read-only, enforced in the database.
• Prefer not to start cold? The demo project is a full cloned bid you can break safely.

• Ideal upload: MP4, H.264 video + AAC audio, faststart enabled (moov atom at the front). Without faststart the browser can't scrub until the whole file downloads.
• Target 1280px on the longest edge, ~24 CRF (roughly 2–8 Mbps). That's review-res — plenty to bid against, and it scrubs instantly.
• Sweet spot is under 200 MB per QuickTime. Anything larger still works, but expect slower uploads and laggier scrubbing over typical office upstream.
• Warning at 500 MB, hard cap at 5 GB per file. ProRes, DNxHD and most .mov masters won't play in Chrome — Slate detects this and transcodes a web proxy in your browser before upload (a few minutes on a long reel).
• Fastest path: export the review H.264 you'd send to a client and upload that, rather than the master.

• Local: open a file off your machine or a mounted volume. No upload, no transcode, instant playback even on a 40 GB ProRes.
• The catch: browsers won't let a web app keep a file path between sessions. On reload you re-open the file. Markers, shots and bids are safe — only the media pointer drops. A LOCAL LINKS LIMITED pill in the Player tells you when you're in this mode.
• Cloud: re-opens on any machine and everyone on the project sees the same cut. Private storage only — playback uses short-lived signed links, never public URLs.
• Rule of thumb: local for solo speed, cloud the moment a second person needs to look at it.

• Auto-markers OCR needs legible burn-ins. Crop tightly around the code and preview a few frames before the full sweep.
• AI Quick-Bid proposes day counts as a starting point, not an estimate. Review before locking.
• Undo covers the last 7 days for editors and above. Older entries stay in the activity log as history.
• Uploads are bound by your upstream — leave the tab open until they finish.
• We ship to the live app often. If the UI shifts mid-session, reload.

• This version is deliberately standalone: bid a QuickTime fast, then export the data into whatever you already run on.
• Next: richer export presets and mappings so the numbers land in your template without hand-shuffling columns.
• Longer term: direct integrations — EDL/shot-list ingest, tracker and production-management sync, so Slate reads and writes in place rather than exporting.
• Per-studio behaviour is configuration on our end, not a fork. If your workflow assumes something different, tell us and it's usually a settings change.

• Use the feedback button in the app — in the AI menu (bottom right) and your user menu. It's not a separate page; it sends the report with the page you were on.
• Include what you expected, what happened, the project and bid version, and whether media was local or cloud. A screenshot saves a round trip.
• Security issues go straight to info@whatifi.io — please don't disclose publicly first.
• Feature requests welcome through the same form. Several shipped features started as one line of early-cohort feedback.

Short walkthrough clips are coming to this page — for now the docs cover each step in detail.