Montage
Montage is an AI video repurposing platform that turns podcasts, webinars and event recordings into a short list of scored, publish-ready clips, edited by transcript and exported as branded video or editor-ready XML.
What is Montage?
Montage is an AI video repurposing platform published by Ukumi Inc., a San Francisco company. Its promise is stated plainly on the homepage: one long video becomes ten or more short clips. What separates it from the rest of the category is the problem it claims to attack. Montage argues the bottleneck is not a shortage of footage but editorial bandwidth, the number of good decisions a producer can make per hour of recording.
That conviction shapes the product. Where most clip generators flood you with thirty candidates ranked by a generic virality score, Montage returns a deliberately short list of eight to ten moments, each scored on two axes: how well it matches the brief you wrote, and how well it fits the platform you are targeting. You review a shortlist instead of sifting a pile.
Refinement happens in the transcript. Delete a sentence and the corresponding video disappears; adjust a clip boundary by a single word; strip filler and tighten the opening, without ever touching a timeline. Smart reframing then converts landscape to vertical, tracking the speaker so the face stays centred even when the camera pans. Captions follow your own typeface, colours and animation style rather than a stock template, and a speaker badge can be added.
The technical envelope is unusually generous for the category: files up to 20 GB, resolutions up to 4K, and exports at full source resolution with no downscaling. Output leaves either as a finished MP4 or as an editor handoff, in XML for Premiere Pro, FCPXML for Final Cut or JSON for custom pipelines. Shareable review links let clients approve clips without an account.
Three verticals are packaged on top: podcasts, where the loop runs in roughly thirty minutes; agencies, with per-client folders, brand presets, seats and automatic audio denoising; and events, adding multi-camera sync, speaker attribution and same-day delivery. The tool is web only, with no mobile app and no public API.
What it does
- Score the strongest moments in a long recording against a written brief and return 8 to 10 ranked candidates
- Edit video by editing its transcript, cutting at sentence level and trimming a single word at a time
- Reframe horizontal footage to vertical automatically, keeping the speaker centred as they move
- Burn in captions that follow your own typeface, colours and animation style
- Export finished MP4 clips or hand off to an editor as XML, FCPXML or JSON
- Share any clip as a review link that clients and speakers can open without logging in
- Ingest files up to 20 GB at 4K from an upload, a URL, Google Drive or Dropbox
When to use Montage / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if Montage is the right fit.
When to use Montage
- Content teams that publish every week and need a repeatable clipping workflow rather than a one-off experiment
- Podcasters sitting on a backlog of full-length episodes they have never had time to cut down
- Agencies and production studios juggling several client brands, each with its own caption style and approval loop
- Event and conference organisers who want speaker clips delivered while the event is still running
- B2B marketing teams repurposing long webinars and interviews into LinkedIn, Shorts and Reels content
When not to use Montage
- Anyone looking for maximum clip volume: Montage deliberately returns 8 to 10 scored candidates, not 30 or more
- Casual or occasional users, a profile the site explicitly writes out of its comparison table
- Teams that want the AI to make the final editorial call, since Montage leaves that decision to a human
- Developers needing programmatic access, as no public API or documentation is published
- Mobile-first users, because the product runs only as a web application with no iOS or Android app
How to use Montage
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Create an account on the Montage studio; no credit card is required to start
- Upload your recording, or paste a video URL, or import it from Google Drive or Dropbox
- Write a brief describing your audience and the kind of moments you are hunting for
- Let the platform analyse the full recording and surface 8 to 10 scored candidates
- Review the shortlist, reading each candidate's score for brief match and platform fit
- Open a candidate and refine it in the transcript, deleting sentences and trimming word by word
- Reframe for vertical or square, letting speaker tracking keep the subject centred
- Apply your caption style, brand colours, logo, outro and, on paid tiers, background music
- Send a review link to clients or speakers so they can approve without signing in
- Export the approved clips as MP4, or hand them to your editor as XML, FCPXML or JSON
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Ingestion limits well above the category norm: 20 GB and 4K, where the site's own comparison puts rivals at 2 to 4 GB
- A genuine editor handoff in XML, FCPXML and JSON, which most clip generators simply do not offer
- Transcript-based editing removes the timeline, making the tool usable by producers who do not edit video
- A short shortlist scored against your brief rather than a generic virality metric, cutting review time
- Brand-accurate captions with per-client presets, useful for agencies running several accounts
- A permanent free tier with 90 minutes of lifetime processing and no credit card required
- Low paid entry point at USD 19 per month, with a multilingual site in English, Spanish and German
Cons
- The GDPR is never mentioned on the site, and no DPA, subprocessor list or certification such as SOC 2 or ISO 27001 is published
- The content licence granted to the vendor is irrevocable, sublicensable and extends to marketing and promotional use
- Terms and privacy policy contradict each other on the minimum age, stating 16 and 18 respectively
- No public API and no mobile application: the product is web only
- No contact page and no about page; demo booking is delegated to a third-party scheduler
- Several advertised capabilities, including batch processing and the sponsor white paper, are still marked as coming soon
- Event Phase 3 pricing is not public and is set after an audit, partly indexed on 20% of documented time savings
Pricing & Plans
A permanent free plan is available at no cost, providing 90 minutes of lifetime processing without a credit card, with 1080p export and a Montage-branded outro. The lowest paid entry point is the Starter plan at USD 19.00 per month, followed by Pro at USD 49.00 per month. Agency plans begin at USD 199.00 per month and event packages start from USD 1,999.00. Annual billing is advertised at a 20% discount, though no annual figure is displayed. All prices are quoted in US dollars only, and no refund policy is published.
- 90 minutes of lifetime processing
- 1080p export
- Montage-branded outro
- no credit card
- 2 hours of processing included
- videos up to 1.5 hours
- 1080p in all aspect ratios
- no Montage outro
- 4 hours included
- videos up to 2.5 hours
- 4K export
- custom branding
- audio enhancement
- editor handoff
- captions in 10+ languages
- 3 seats
- 10 video uploads per month
- unlimited clip exports
- XML export
- 5 seats plus USD 49 per additional seat
- 50 uploads per month
- priority processing
- custom caption styles per client
- vertical and horizontal clips
- XML export per clip
- branding setup
- workflow baseline report
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how Montage handles your data.
GDPR overview
There is no mention of the GDPR anywhere on the site: the word does not appear once across the homepage, the privacy policy, the terms, the fair usage policy or the solution pages. No EU representative under Article 27 is designated, no data protection officer is named, and no Data Processing Agreement is offered. The privacy policy does grant rights that overlap with the regulation, but conditionally: depending on your location, you may access, correct, delete or obtain a copy of your data, and object to or restrict certain processing, by writing to support@montage.app. International transfers are covered by a single sentence promising appropriate safeguards, without naming standard contractual clauses. For a US company processing third-party video and audio, this silence should be treated as an open question rather than a compliance claim.
Who owns the data?
You keep ownership of everything you upload. In exchange, the Terms of Service grant Ukumi Inc. a worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable and irrevocable licence to use, host, modify, process and display that content in order to operate, improve and provide the service, and, where applicable, for marketing and promotional purposes. The exact scope is said to depend on how the service is configured and may be narrowed by product-specific terms. Note the combination: the licence is irrevocable and sublicensable, and its marketing clause is broader than the strict service-delivery wording used elsewhere in the same documents. Deleting your account does not visibly cancel that licence.
Reuse rights
Your uploads, transcripts, captions and edits stay yours to reuse freely: nothing in the Terms restricts publishing, selling or distributing the clips you export, and no permission request or attribution to Montage is required. Paid plans explicitly remove the Montage outro so exported clips carry no vendor branding, and the Pro tier adds an editor handoff package of XML, transcripts and subtitles intended precisely for further reuse in Premiere Pro, Final Cut or DaVinci Resolve. The restrictions run the other way: the acceptable use policy forbids scraping, reverse engineering and using outputs to build a competing product, and forbids using a person's likeness, voice or identity without authorisation.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
The privacy policy is brief on hosting. It states that your information may be processed and stored in countries other than your own, including the United States, and that appropriate safeguards are relied upon where required, without naming standard contractual clauses or any other mechanism. No other hosting country is named, no region is specified, and no data residency option is offered to customers. The company itself, Ukumi Inc., is registered in San Francisco and the terms place the agreement under California law with disputes heard in San Francisco courts. Categories of service providers are disclosed, covering hosting, analytics, security, email delivery and payment processing, but none is named individually and no subprocessor list is published. For information, DNS resolution points the domain to an Amazon Web Services address in Ashburn, Virginia, though that is a network observation rather than a statement by the vendor. European customers should note there is no EU hosting commitment of any kind.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting Montage.
- The licence you grant over your uploads is irrevocable, sublicensable and covers marketing and promotional use, which deserves a careful read before uploading client or confidential footage
- Uploading recordings of other people makes you responsible for their likeness and voice rights; the terms put that obligation squarely on you and forbid unauthorised use
- No GDPR mention, no DPA, no subprocessor list and no certification means you cannot easily demonstrate compliance to your own clients or legal team
- The no-training promise carries an escape clause, so today's default may change if the vendor announces it and offers an opt-out
- Leaning on AI scoring can quietly erode a producer's own ear for what makes a moment work, since the shortlist arrives pre-judged
- Subscriptions renew automatically and no refund policy is published, so cancellation timing is entirely on you
- Data is hosted in the United States with no EU residency option, and the fair usage cap of 10 GB per day can be changed unilaterally
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Very low. There is nothing to install: you sign up on the web studio, and no credit card is required to begin. No video editing skill is needed either, since editing happens in the transcript rather than on a timeline. The only real learning curve is writing a good brief, because the quality of the shortlist depends directly on how precisely you describe the audience and the moments you want. Teams that intend to use the editor handoff will still need someone comfortable in Premiere Pro, Final Cut or DaVinci Resolve.
Deployment
Integrations
Supported languages
Behind Montage
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Alternatives
Tools that compete with or complement Montage.
Frequently asked questions
Who is Montage actually built for?
How does it differ from tools like OpusClip or Descript?
Do I need video editing experience to use it?
What file sizes and resolutions are supported?
Is there a free plan, and what does it cost after that?
Can clients review clips before anything is published?
Is my footage used to train AI models?
Is there a mobile app or an API?
What is the minimum age to use the service?
Are there usage limits beyond the plan quotas?
Should you pick Montage?
Montage is a focused tool that knows exactly which part of the repurposing problem it wants to solve. Rather than competing on how many clips it can generate, it competes on the quality of the shortlist, returning eight to ten moments scored against a brief you wrote yourself. For teams that publish weekly and care about brand fit, that inversion is the whole argument, and it is a defensible one.
Two capabilities genuinely separate it from the crowd. The ingestion envelope of 20 GB at 4K is well beyond what the category usually accepts, which matters if your source material is a three-hour conference recording rather than a phone video. And the editor handoff in XML, FCPXML and JSON turns the tool into a stage in a professional pipeline instead of a closed box, letting a producer make the editorial call and an editor finish the work.
The reservations are not about the product but about its paperwork. For a platform that ingests third-party video and audio, the compliance documentation is remarkably thin: the GDPR is never named, no Data Processing Agreement is offered, no subprocessor list is published, and no security certification is displayed. The content licence granted in the terms is broad, being irrevocable, sublicensable and extending to marketing use. The terms and the privacy policy even contradict each other on the minimum age.
The company behind it, Ukumi Inc., is young and the domain was only registered in October 2025. If you handle client footage or regulated material, resolve the data protection questions with the vendor before committing. If you simply need to get more out of recordings you already own, the free tier costs nothing to test and answers the only question that really matters: whether the shortlist is any good.
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