Using video

The Video section is a dedicated player for watchable video — full playback controls and sound, or a silent looping background clip. It’s separate from the Media section, which stays focused on still images and short animated loops.

Three ways to source a video

When you add a Video section, you choose where the footage comes from. Which option is right depends on the video:

• Paste a YouTube, Vimeo, or Instagram link — no upload at all. Best for long-form content, or anything already hosted elsewhere (interviews, campaign films, existing channel content). Nothing is stored in your portal; the section just embeds the player.
• Upload a short loop (5 MB or less) — stored the same way as your images, in your site’s own repository. This tier is meant for brief, silent, background-style clips — the kind of thing you’d otherwise use an animated GIF for.
• Upload a larger video (up to 200 MB) — for real footage with audio: interviews, product demos, brand films you host yourself. These are stored in your site’s dedicated video storage rather than the repository, so they don’t bloat it.

You don’t have to think about which tier a file lands in — drop it in and the portal figures it out from the file size. The distinction only matters for what you get: small loops upload instantly, larger ones show a progress bar while they transfer.

Large uploads need your site’s video storage to be turned on. If it isn’t, the upload area will tell you and suggest embedding from YouTube or Vimeo instead — contact Drawn Agency to enable it.

Adding a Video section

1. Add a Video section like any other (see Adding & removing sections).
2. The new section appears as an empty placeholder. Clicking it opens the media library, where you can upload a new video or pick an existing one from your library.
3. For an upload, drag a file onto the drop zone or click to browse. The browser reads the video’s dimensions and duration and generates a poster frame automatically — no separate step needed.

Only .mp4 and .webm files are accepted for upload. Files over 200 MB are rejected — compress or trim the video first.

Embedding from YouTube, Vimeo, or Instagram, or choosing the source explicitly

The empty placeholder only opens the media library — it doesn’t have a URL field. To embed a YouTube, Vimeo, or Instagram video, or to explicitly pick between an upload and an embed at any time, open the section’s settings (the gear icon) and use the Source tab:

• Choose from library — opens the same media library picker as clicking the placeholder.
• Paste embed URL — paste the full YouTube, Vimeo, or Instagram URL and confirm. The section fetches the video’s dimensions automatically so the player reserves the right amount of space. Instagram doesn’t expose dimensions, so the section guesses from the link (reels 9:16, posts 4:5) and shows an Aspect toggle to correct it.

Playback modes

Each Video section has a playback setting with two modes:

• Click to play (default) — shows a poster image with native play controls. Visitors click to start playback with sound, and can pause, seek, and adjust volume.
• Ambient — autoplays silently on loop with no controls, like a looping background clip. Use this for footage that should play as soon as the page loads without demanding attention or sound.

Playback mode applies to self-hosted (library) video only — embedded YouTube/Vimeo/Instagram videos use the provider’s own player controls.

Caption

Turn on Show caption (in the section settings’ Display tab) to display a caption beneath the player. With it on, an editable “Caption” placeholder appears directly under the video — click it and type. There’s no separate field in the settings modal; the caption is edited inline, the same way captions work on Media sections.

The poster image

Click-to-play videos show a poster before playback starts. The portal generates one automatically from the video’s first frame. If you’d rather show a specific image instead, that’s set by your agency during authoring or migration, not from an in-editor settings control — ask Drawn Agency if you need a poster override changed. The poster is independent of the video file either way, so swapping it doesn’t touch the video itself.

External embeds (YouTube/Vimeo/Instagram) use the thumbnail the provider itself supplies.

What happens to videos you remove or replace

Small looping videos (5 MB or less) behave exactly like images in your library — they stick around until you delete them from the media library manager (see Managing your library).

Larger, self-hosted videos work a little differently. Because they live in dedicated video storage rather than your repository, the portal automatically cleans up files that are no longer referenced by either your working draft or your published site — this happens shortly after you publish, not the instant you remove a section, so a video you’re mid-upload on is never at risk of being swept up. You don’t need to do anything to trigger this; replacing or removing a Video section’s source is enough.

Good to know

• Video files, unlike images, are not resized into multiple variants — the file you upload is served as-is.
• Self-hosted video plays back with native browser controls; there is no custom player chrome.
• YouTube embeds use the privacy-enhanced (no-cookie) player; Vimeo uses its standard embedded player. Neither autoplays with sound.
• Instagram embeds render Instagram’s post card (header, caption, and all) rather than a bare player, set Meta cookies for viewers, and won’t display posts from private accounts. If the post is deleted or restricted later, the embed breaks silently — for anything long-lived, consider self-hosting the footage instead.