Export settings for YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and Shorts
Every platform re-encodes whatever you upload. You cannot stop that, and you cannot upload your way around it — but you can hand the encoder a clean source so what it produces still looks like what you made.
The table
| Platform | Aspect | Resolution | FPS | Bitrate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| YouTube (standard) | 16:9 | 1080p | 30 | 10–12 Mbps |
| YouTube Shorts | 9:16 | 1080p | 30 | 8–10 Mbps |
| TikTok | 9:16 | 1080p | 30 | 8–10 Mbps |
| Instagram Reels | 9:16 | 1080p | 30 | 8–10 Mbps |
| Instagram feed | 4:5 | 1080p | 30 | 8–10 Mbps |
| X / LinkedIn | 1:1 or 16:9 | 1080p | 30 | 8 Mbps |
Format is MP4 in every single row. More on why below.
Why 1080p and not 4K
Platforms cap delivery at or near 1080p for the overwhelming majority of viewers, and they re-encode everything regardless. A 4K upload gives you a longer export, a much larger file, a slower upload — and a stream most people receive at 1080p anyway.
There is one real exception: footage you intend to crop or reframe later. Extra pixels buy you room to punch in. For a finished post, 1080p is the answer.
Why bitrate matters more than resolution
This is the setting people ignore and the one that decides whether your export survives.
Visualizers are unusually hard to compress. Fast-moving high-contrast edges — bars snapping up and down against a dark background — are exactly what a video codec handles worst. Give it too few bits and you get blocky smearing around every moving edge, plus banding across any gradient background.
If an export looks soft or blocky, raise the bitrate, not the resolution. More bits fix compression artefacts. More pixels just produce a bigger file with the same artefacts.
Push to 12 Mbps for lyric videos and anything with large flat colour areas behind text, where banding is most visible.
Why 30fps
A spectrum updates smoothly at 30fps and the eye does not resolve more. Doubling to 60 doubles your export time and roughly doubles your file for a difference almost nobody perceives in a feed.
Reserve 60fps for gameplay or fast camera movement. A visualizer is neither.
MP4 or WebM?
MP4 for anything you are uploading. It is universally accepted and efficiently compressed.
WebM only for transparency. WebM with VP9 carries an alpha channel, which MP4 cannot — so it is the right choice when you want the visualizer as an overlay to composite over footage in your editor. No platform does anything useful with an alpha channel on upload, so never use it for a final post. The transparent export guide covers that workflow.
If you pick MP4 with a transparent background, the background is filled black on export — the editor warns you at the point you choose the format, because the alternative is a file that silently looks wrong.
Safe zones — the setting that isn't a setting
Every vertical platform draws its interface over your video. Treat these as unusable:
- Bottom ~20% — caption, username, audio credit, progress bar
- Right ~15% — like, comment, share, profile
- Top ~10% — status bar, and in Stories the progress segments
This is the most common reason something looks right in an editor and is half-covered in the feed. Keep text and anything load-bearing in the middle band.
Before you upload
- Watch it on a phone. At arm's length, sound off. Most problems are obvious in ten seconds and annoying after you have posted.
- Check the first second. It decides whether anyone sees the rest.
- Check the end. Platforms loop; an abrupt cut back to the start is jarring, and a clean one is free.