How your material is handled

You are sending an unfinished programme that has not aired yet, to two people in another country. This page says exactly what happens to it — who can reach it, where it sits, how long it stays, and when it is destroyed.

Confidentiality and security practice · Cleared for Air · September 2026

The short version I sign your NDA before any file changes hands. Two named people touch your material, on their own accounts, on our own machines, in one folder per job. Your files are used only for your job, never shown or published without your written permission, and returned or deleted when the job is done.

Who can reach it

Two people, both named on this site. Sergio Mikalkenas does the editing, the measurement and the report. Brian Mikalkenas runs the technical side — the machines, the storage, the backups, and who can reach what.
Individual accounts, no shared logins. Every action belongs to a person, which is what makes a record worth anything.
No third party without your say. No assistants, no freelancers, no subcontractors on your material. If a job ever needs another pair of hands, you are told first, and that person signs the same terms before receiving anything.

Where it lives

On our own machines in São Paulo, on drives that are ours — not on a personal phone, not on a shared family computer, not on a public file-sharing account, and never on a machine anyone else uses.
Transfer is your choice. Your FTP or managed transfer service, your cloud folder, or a private link from us. If your distributor requires a specific route, we use that one.
Working copies stay inside one folder per job, so there is one place to audit and one place to delete.

Backups, while the job is open

Your material is backed up while I am working on it, because losing an episode a week before a feed date is its own kind of breach. The backup stays on our own hardware — no third-party cloud — and it is destroyed with everything else when the job closes.

How long it is kept, and how it goes away

Material is held until your delivery is accepted, and then up to 30 days in case something comes back from the distributor.
After that it is returned or deleted — your choice, said in writing when we start.
I confirm the deletion by email, and keep that confirmation with the job.
What I keep afterwards: only the QC report, the measured values and the file manifest — no picture, no sound, no captions. That is what lets me answer a question about your delivery a year later.

Your NDA, and mine

If you have an NDA, I sign yours before any file changes hands — it is routine and it does not delay anything. If you do not have one, I can provide a short mutual agreement that says what is on this page. The sample report on this site is anonymised for the same reason: no client material is used as an example without written permission.

The size of the operation is part of the answer

This is a two-person studio, and everything above describes what two people actually do — a small number of named accounts, our own machines, one folder per job, a written retention rule, and an NDA I will sign today. Fewer hands on your material is not a limitation here; it is most of the protection. If your broadcaster requires a specific vendor for any part of the work, you contract them directly and I work alongside them.

Questions before you send a file?

Ask them — that is a sign of a producer who has been burned before, and it takes five minutes to answer. The first Delivery QC Audit is free, and the NDA comes first.

Get in touch

This page describes how Cleared for Air handles client material. It is a statement of practice, not a contract; where an NDA or a service agreement says something different, that document governs. © 2026 Cleared for Air.