Custom hero image and video: specs and how to upload

Want your homepage hero to show your own video or image instead of pulling from your scenes? One hero design supports that — here's exactly where it is and what to upload.

Which hero supports a custom upload

Go to Themes → Sections and look at the Hero Component cards. There are three hero designs:

• Featured Scene Slider Hero — rotates through your latest or featured scenes (you pick how many slides). No custom upload.
• Single Featured Scene Hero — spotlights one thing. This is the one that supports custom uploads.
• Hero Component with Featured Trailer — slider layout with prominent trailer/purchase buttons. No custom upload.

How to upload a custom hero

1. Select the Single Featured Scene Hero variant (or click its edit option if it's already active).
2. In its settings, set Content source to Custom assets.
3. Two upload fields appear: Custom hero image / poster and Custom hero video. For each, you can upload a file from your device or paste a direct URL and we'll fetch it for you.
4. Save — the hero updates on your site.

You can use either or both: video only plays the video; image only shows a static hero; image + video uses the image as the loading poster before the video plays.

Video specs

• Format: MP4 (H.264) or WebM. MP4 is the safe choice and plays everywhere.
• Dimensions: 1920×1080 (16:9 landscape). The hero fills the full width of the page and crops to fit different screens, so keep the important action centered — the edges may be trimmed, especially on phones.
• Length: 10–30 seconds. It's a looping banner, not a trailer.
• File size: aim for under 30MB — ideally 10–20MB. Bigger files upload fine, but a heavy hero is the single biggest thing slowing your homepage down, and the hero is the first thing every visitor loads.
• Audio: not needed — the hero autoplays muted. Strip the audio track when exporting to save file size.

Image / poster specs

• Format: JPEG or WebP recommended; PNG and GIF also accepted.
• Dimensions: 1920×1080 to match the video. Same center-cropping applies — keep the subject in the middle.
• File size: under 500KB is ideal, 1–2MB maximum. A compressed JPEG at quality 80 looks identical to visitors and loads far faster.

Good to know

• The video autoplays when it scrolls into view and pauses when it scrolls out.
• Always upload a poster image alongside a video — it shows instantly while the video loads, so there's never a blank banner.
• If the hero doesn't update right away after saving, give it a couple of minutes and refresh — see Site updates and demo access.