One address, however many cuts
Update your showreel without changing the link
The address outlives the edit.
A reel link is not a message you send once. It is printed on a card, pasted into a signature, typed into a directory profile and submitted with a festival entry. Then you recut the reel. Here is how the new cut takes over that address, and the four things that still point at the old one until you fix them.
Video hosting for filmmakers · 5 GB free · Paid plans from USD 9/month
Updated September 2026
Why the address matters more than the cut
A reel link is infrastructure,
not a message you send.
A delivery link has one audience and a short life. A reel link has an open-ended audience and no expiry, and by the time you recut the reel you have usually lost track of everywhere it was written down.
Think about where the current one actually is. It was typed into a directory profile two years ago by someone at a production company. It sits under your name in an email signature that has since been forwarded through three studios. It was submitted with a festival entry that is still in a database. It is on a card in a wallet, in an agency roster, at the bottom of a PDF rate sheet, and in a message thread you cannot search any more.
None of those can be edited on the afternoon you finish a new cut. So a reel host has one job the day you recut: let the new film take over the address the old film was using, without asking you to send anybody anything. That is a different requirement from version history, and it is a different requirement from re-delivering a job to a client, which is covered separately in replacing a video without changing the link.
Printed matter
Cards, rate sheets and festival programmes are fixed the day they are printed. Anything you hand someone on paper has to survive every recut you make afterwards, because you will never get it back to correct it.
Email signatures
A signature is copied forward by everyone who replies to you. The reel line in it is quietly redistributed for years, and it is the one link a producer clicks when your name comes up in a meeting.
Directories and rosters
Crew directories, agency rosters and association listings are edited by someone else on their schedule. A dead or stale reel link there is a bad first impression you do not get to see.
Submissions
Festival forms, grant applications and pitch decks freeze the link at the moment you submit. The panel opens it weeks later, and it should open the best version of your work that exists by then.
What a recut keeps
Six things stay exactly where
the last cut left them.
In the dashboard the control is called Upload a new version. It writes the new master onto the record the world is already pointing at, rather than creating a second film beside it.
Behaviour verified in the uncompressed.io codebase on 7 September 2026. The dashboard control is labelled Upload a new version, inside a panel headed New version.
What does not follow the new cut
Four things still point
at the film you just replaced.
This is the part worth reading twice. The swap is deliberately narrow: it changes the stored file and the numbers that describe it, and it leaves everything else alone. Some of that everything else was describing the previous edit.
The old file is deleted, not archived
When the new cut lands, the previous one is removed from storage here. There is no version history on this feature and no rollback, so the only copy of the outgoing reel is the one on your own drives. Export it, keep it, then swap.
The poster still shows the old cut
The thumbnail is stored separately from the film and the replace does not touch it. Your profile page, your links and every embed keep showing a frame from an edit that no longer exists. On a reel this is the most visible failure, because the poster is the first thing a producer sees.
Captions describe the previous edit
An existing transcript stays attached to the film and is not regenerated. After a recut the words are still the old words at the old timings, sliding further out of sync with every shot you moved. Redo them, or remove them until you do.
Old timecoded notes sit at the wrong moments
Any timecoded feedback left on the film survives the swap and keeps its original timecodes. A note that was written about the shot at 42 seconds now lands wherever 42 seconds falls in the new edit, which is usually nowhere useful. Read those notes as history, not as marks on the current cut.
Say it plainly
None of this is versioning and we will not describe it as versioning. A replace leaves you with one film: the current cut, at the address it has always had. If you need two cuts to exist at once, with approvals recorded against each of them, that is the review room, which is a separate feature and the right place for the rounds that happen before a reel is published.
The recut checklist
Five minutes of housekeeping
after the upload finishes.
Archive the outgoing cut yourself
Before you touch the dashboard, put last year’s reel export somewhere you will still have it in five years. The replace deletes the file on our side, so your copy becomes the only copy. This is the step people skip and regret.
Upload the new version
Open the reel, choose Upload a new version and drop the new export. The file moves in 10 MB parts with up to 60 attempts per part, so a weak connection recovers instead of failing, and the transfer keeps running while you move around the app. A reload or a closed tab ends it, and you re-drop the same file to continue.
Recapture the poster
Use Pick a frame from the video, scrub the new master and capture the still. Arrow keys move in 0.04-second steps and Shift moves a second at a time. The capture is saved as a JPEG up to 1600 px wide. If your browser cannot decode that master, upload your own poster image with the button beside it.
Redo captions, and reread old notes as history
If the reel carried captions, generate them again against the new cut. Then look at any timecoded feedback still on the film: those marks refer to the previous edit, so treat them as a record of what people said last time rather than as notes on what is playing now.
0
Links to reissue
The address, both URL shapes and every existing embed are untouched.
1
Poster to repick
The thumbnail is the one visible thing that does not update itself.
0
Processing steps
Nothing is transcoded, so the new cut is live when the upload finishes.
5 TB
Per file
The ceiling for any single upload. The check runs in the browser.
The new export still has to fit your plan, so a reel that grows from a 4 GB file to a 40 GB file needs the room for it. On the free Starter plan the real constraint is not the per-file ceiling at all, it is the 5 GB of storage and one film at a time, which happens to be exactly the shape of a person who hosts a reel and nothing else.
Where the reel actually lives
The page, the player,
and the address you print.
A reel that gets recut every few months is really two things: a public page that has to look like you, and one durable address that everything else points at.
The page is your public profile at uncompressed.io/yourname, mirrored at yourname.uncompressed.io. It exists from the moment you pick a username at signup, with nothing to publish or switch on, and it starts empty on purpose: every upload arrives Hidden, so a film appears only once you set it to public and give it a layout tag. The tags are Hero at full width, Featured as two side by side, Standard three across, and Hidden for anything kept off the page. A replace never changes the tag or the row order, so the reel you recut this morning is still sitting where you put it.
The player carries nothing of ours on any plan, free included. There is no wordmark, badge or watermark, and the title, view count and share button are off unless you switch them on. Upload your own logo and it sits bare on the frame. It streams the file you uploaded and nothing else, which carries a real cost worth naming here rather than in a footnote: there is no rendition ladder, so there is no smaller copy of the reel for the player to fall back to, and a producer opening your link on a weak line waits on a buffer instead of watching a softer version. If most of your reel traffic arrives on mobile data, weigh that seriously. What we do not have is a custom domain: the only addresses that exist are uncompressed.io/yourname/the-reel and yourname.uncompressed.io/the-reel. If the link on your card has to read as your own domain, this is the wrong host for you, and that is a straight answer rather than a roadmap promise. The wider setup is covered in video portfolio hosting for filmmakers.
One warning that belongs next to a recut. The address is stable across a replace, but it is not stable across a rename. Editing the tail of the link in the Share panel retires the old one: there is no redirect and no history of previous addresses, so anything printed with the old tail stops resolving. Pick the wording you want to live with on the day you first publish the reel, then leave it alone and change the film underneath it forever.
When a replace is the wrong move
Two cases where a new film
is the right answer.
Most reels are the left column. A general reel is a single object with a long life, and its value comes from the fact that its address has never moved. Splitting it into reel-2024, reel-2025 and reel-2026 hands you three addresses, two of which are quietly wrong, and puts the burden of knowing which is current on the person you are trying to impress.
The right column is for cuts that are genuinely separate objects. A narrative reel next to a commercial reel, a director’s cut of one piece, a cutdown built for a single pitch: those want their own addresses because somebody will eventually need to open two of them at once. And if what you actually want is to keep old cuts side by side with approvals recorded against each, you want the review room rather than a replace button, because a replace leaves exactly one file standing.
Questions
Frequently asked
If I recut my reel, do I have to reprint anything?
No. The address is a property of the film’s record, not of the file behind it, so uploading a new cut over the existing one leaves the URL character for character the same. The card in someone’s wallet, the line in your email signature and the link in a directory listing all keep working and start serving the new cut the next time anyone presses play.
Does my view count start again after a recut?
No. Views live on the record and the swap only rewrites the file and the numbers that describe it, so a reel that has been running for two years keeps the count it earned. That matters more for a reel than for a delivery, because the number is on the public page a producer is looking at.
Will the thumbnail update itself?
No, and this is the one that catches people. The poster frame is stored separately and the replace does not touch it, so your page and every embed keep showing a frame from the previous cut until you pick a new one. Open the film, use Pick a frame from the video, scrub the new master and capture a fresh poster.
What happens to captions after a recut?
They stay attached to the film and they still describe the previous cut, so the timings drift the moment the edit changes. If your reel carried captions, redo them after the swap. If you never had them, there is nothing to do.
Can I get the previous cut back?
Not from us. The old file is deleted from storage when the new one lands, so there is no version history and no rollback on this feature. Archive the outgoing export on your own drives before you upload the replacement, the same way you would keep a project file.
Is there a wait before people see the new reel?
No. Nothing is transcoded here and there is no rendition ladder, so the reel is live the moment the upload finishes and the first frame anyone sees is the file you exported. The honest trade is on the other side of that: with no lower rendition to fall back to, a thin connection buffers rather than quietly switching to a softer version.
Can I point my own domain at the reel instead?
No. There is no custom domain here. Your reel answers at uncompressed.io/yourname/the-reel and at yourname.uncompressed.io/the-reel, and those are the addresses to print. If a domain you own has to be the public face of the work, that is a real reason to host elsewhere and we will not pretend otherwise.
Keep the address, change the film
Starter is free with 5 GB and one film at a time, which is enough to host a reel and nothing else. Lite is $9 a month for 100 GB and Pro is $25 a month for 500 GB. Views, uploads and viewers are unlimited on every plan, free included.
Sources
- 1.uncompressed.io pricing: plan storage, unlimited views, uploads and viewers (plan figures and the per-file ceiling verified in product code, 7 September 2026)
- 2.uncompressed.io review room: versions, timecoded comments and approvals (product page; feature behaviour verified in product code, 7 September 2026)
- 3.uncompressed.io guide: replace a video without changing the link (our own guide to the same mechanism, verified 7 September 2026)
- 4.uncompressed.io guide: video portfolio hosting for filmmakers (our own guide to the profile page, player branding and address shapes, verified 7 September 2026)