How to make a sizzle reel from the work on your website

Last updated 2026-08-17 · 6 min read

What is the short version?

Your best work is already published, spread across a portfolio site, a video channel and a social feed. A sizzle reel is that work in one place, and the reason it does not exist is that collecting it is genuinely tedious.

1. Go to Vizard Agent and give it your site.
2. Say the length and what kind of work should lead.
3. Say if there is anything on the site you no longer want shown.

What do you need before you start?

Your site and a preference. Vizard Agent finds and downloads the work itself, and what it needs from you is a sense of the order — which projects represent you now, and which are on the site for historical reasons.

• The portfolio URL. Vizard Agent maps it and finds the project pages.
• What should lead. Your strongest or most recent work. Otherwise it decides from what it finds.
• The length. Around two minutes is a working sizzle reel; ninety seconds is tighter.
• Anything to exclude. Old work, a client who has asked not to be shown, an unfinished project.
• Your channels. Say if your films live on a video platform as well as the site.

What do you type into Vizard Agent?

One line is enough to start. Vizard Agent goes and finds the material, and the useful thing to add is an emphasis — because a portfolio reel is a claim about what you do, and the ordering is the claim.

Prompt

Variants worth knowing:

• A shorter cut. Ninety seconds for a feed, two minutes for a site or a pitch.
• One discipline only. "Just the documentary work" makes a far sharper reel.
• With a track you own. Upload it; the music on a sizzle reel is half the impression.

What does Vizard Agent actually do?

Here is the order Vizard Agent worked in on a real portfolio reel. Most of the run is retrieval, and the interesting part is how far it went: past the embeds, into the markup, and through the site builder's own streaming format.

1. Browses the site and loads the trailer playbook.
2. Extracts the media and page content, and finds the portfolio pages and video embeds.
3. Finds the real project URLs and the linked social channels.
4. Downloads the films from the video channel and the work posted on social.
5. Scrapes the site's HTML for actual media URLs, project page by project page.
6. Downloads everything it found in parallel.
7. Probes the site builder's video URL formats when the direct links do not resolve.
8. Extracts the streaming URLs and downloads the films, refreshing the builder's access tokens when they expire.
9. Samples frames from all the footage and reviews the contact sheets together to see the whole body of work at once.

Steps 7 and 8 are the persistence that makes this possible at all. Video on a hosted site is rarely a plain file link; Vizard Agent worked out the format, got fresh tokens when the first ones expired, and kept going until the films were actually downloaded.

What does the result look like?

From the run this page is written from, probed on the delivered file: 608x1080, H.264, 24fps, 147.82 seconds, AAC audio. Vertical, just under two and a half minutes, cut from films collected across the portfolio site and the linked channels.

Vizard Agent reviewed every piece of footage as contact sheets before cutting, which is how a reel gets ordered by what the work actually looks like rather than by the order the site lists it in.

Two and a half minutes is the upper end for a reel. Vizard Agent paces it so each project gets a recognisable moment rather than a fragment, which is what makes a reel readable as a body of work.

Expect tens of minutes rather than minutes. This category was not separately measured; comparable work runs a median of 28 to 38 minutes end to end, and across all projects the median cost by tier is Flash 47, Pro 55, Max 242, Ultra 263 credits.

When does this not work well?

A sizzle reel is a claim about your work, and Vizard Agent can only work with what is publicly published. Where the site hosts low-resolution previews rather than the films, that is what the reel is built from.

• Web copies are compressed. If you have the masters, upload them; the site's versions are made for streaming.
• Some hosts cannot be unlocked. Vizard Agent tries hard and a determined paywall or DRM ends the attempt.
• Client work has permissions attached. Publishing a reel of client films is often contractual rather than technical.
• Music rights do not transfer. The track on a project film was licensed for that film rather than for a reel it now appears in, which is why Vizard Agent scores the reel separately.
• A reel is a claim about now. Work from five years ago says something about your history rather than about what you would make today.
• Old work dilutes. A reel is your best six projects, not your whole portfolio.

How do you fix a result that came back wrong?

Say which project should change. Vizard Agent keeps every downloaded film and all the contact sheets it reviewed, so reordering the reel or dropping a client's work is a re-cut from material it already holds rather than a second pass over your website and your channels.

• "Lead with the newest project." A reorder from the same footage.
• "Drop that client's work." Removed and the reel re-paced.
• "Make it ninety seconds." A tighter cut from the same material.

How does Vizard Agent compare to doing it yourself?

By hand this is opening every project page, right-clicking for a video that will not download, exporting from your channel instead, and assembling six films whose colour and levels do not match — which is why most portfolios still link out instead.

Common questions

Does it need my source files? No, though they are better. Vizard Agent downloads what is published and uses masters if you upload them.

Can it find work on my channels too? Yes. Vizard Agent follows the links from your site and pulls films from the channels it finds.

What if the videos are not downloadable? Vizard Agent works out the host's format and refreshes tokens where it can; a hard paywall stops it.

How long should a sizzle reel be? Ninety seconds to two minutes. Longer is a showreel, and fewer people finish it.

Can I use my own music? Yes, and you should. Upload the track and Vizard Agent cuts to it.

Does it add music and titles? Yes. Vizard Agent scores the reel and can set your name and contact details on a closing card.

Can it exclude a client? Yes. Name them and Vizard Agent leaves that work out of the cut.