How to make a sizzle reel from the work on your website
Give Vizard Agent your portfolio site and ask for a sizzle reel. It finds every project page, scrapes the real video URLs out of the markup, works out the site builder's streaming format, downloads your films, including the ones on your channels, and cuts them into one reel.
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. Say the length too: ninety seconds for a feed, two minutes for a site or a pitch.
Prompt
What does Vizard Agent actually do?
Most of the work is retrieval. Video on a hosted site is rarely a plain file link, so Vizard Agent goes past the embeds, into the markup and through the site builder's own streaming format, then looks at all the footage together before cutting anything. In the session behind this article it:
- Browsed the site, extracted the media and page content, and found the portfolio pages, the video embeds and the linked social channels.
- Downloaded the films from the video channel and the work posted on social, then scraped the site's HTML for actual media URLs, project page by project page, and downloaded everything in parallel.
- Probed the site builder's video URL formats when the direct links did not resolve, extracted the streaming URLs, and refreshed the builder's access tokens when they expired.
- Sampled frames from all the footage and reviewed the contact sheets together, so the reel was ordered by what the work looks like rather than by the order the site lists it in.
- Delivered a vertical reel at 608x1080, H.264, 24fps and 147.82 seconds, with AAC audio.
When does this not work well?
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, so upload the masters if you have them. Some hosts cannot be unlocked: a determined paywall or DRM ends the attempt. And client work often has permissions attached.
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.
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.
Can it exclude a client? Yes. Name them and Vizard Agent leaves that work out of the cut.