Export Settings for Each Major Platform

Search for export settings and you will find a hundred tables of exact numbers, most of them copied from each other and none of them dated. Some of those numbers are properties of how video works and will still be right in five years. Others are platform policy, and policy changed twice while the article sat there.

The useful skill is telling the two apart. This guide covers which settings are durable, which need checking every time, how to build a delivery sheet you can trust, and the handful of mistakes that survive any correct spec.

Two Kinds of Setting

Everything in the top group can be set once in a preset and left alone for years. Everything in the bottom group belongs on a sheet with a date on it.

The Durable Half, In Detail

Container and codec. MP4 holding H.264 is the combination with the fewest failure modes. Where a platform explicitly supports HEVC or AV1 and you have a reason to use them, they will produce smaller files — with the compatibility caveats set out in what each codec is actually for.

Audio. AAC at 48 kHz, stereo, at a comfortable bitrate. Mono is acceptable for speech-only content and buys very little. What matters more than the codec is the level you deliver at, which is a separate subject with its own targets.

Colour. For standard-dynamic-range delivery, tag the export as Rec. 709 and make sure your timeline was working in it. The characteristic symptom of getting this wrong is a video that looked correct in the editor and arrives flat or oversaturated. It is a tagging problem rather than a grading one, and no amount of re-grading fixes it — the grading itself is a separate pass, described in colour correction versus grading.

Frame rate. Export at the frame rate you shot at. Raising it duplicates frames and adds nothing; lowering it or conforming between incompatible rates introduces uneven motion. If your project genuinely mixes rates, resolve that in the timeline rather than at export.

Resolution and aspect. Deliver at the resolution the project was finished at. For vertical, 1080×1920 remains the working standard, and the part that catches people is not the pixel count but where the platform's interface sits on top of it — mapped in vertical video safe areas.

Build a Master, Then Derive

The workflow that scales is not one export per destination. It is one high-quality master per aspect ratio, and platform versions derived from that.

Why the Durable Half Is Durable

It is worth understanding why the top group of settings does not move, because that is what lets you stop checking them.

Container and codec support is a property of the installed base. Hundreds of millions of devices decode H.264 in dedicated silicon, and those devices do not get replaced quickly. A platform cannot stop accepting the format most of its users can play, so the compatibility floor moves at the speed of hardware replacement rather than at the speed of product decisions.

Colour space is a published standard rather than anybody's preference. Rec. 709 defines what the numbers in a standard-dynamic-range file mean, and a file tagged correctly is interpreted the same way everywhere. When a video arrives looking washed out, no platform decided that — the tag was missing or wrong, and the player guessed.

Frame rate is a property of your footage. There is no platform setting that makes 24 frames per second play correctly as 30; the conversion has to invent the difference either way, and doing it at export rather than in the timeline just moves where the judder is introduced. The cases that actually break are set out in frame rates and what happens when you mix them.

Audio format is durable for the same reason as video: AAC decodes everywhere. What is not durable is the level you deliver at, because that is each platform's own policy and they do not agree.

The Aspect Ratio Question

The setting that causes the most rework is the one people treat as trivial: which shape the video is.

A horizontal master cannot be turned into a good vertical version by cropping at export, because the composition was framed for a different shape. Subjects sit off-centre, on-screen text runs outside the new frame, and anything at the edges disappears. Producing a vertical version properly means re-framing shot by shot, which is edit work rather than export work.

That is an argument for deciding the target shapes before you shoot, not after. If both a horizontal and a vertical version are needed, shooting with headroom for the crop — keeping the subject centred and the important action away from the edges — makes the second version an afternoon instead of a re-edit.

Where a horizontal source has to become vertical after the fact, the choices and their failure modes are covered in reframing 16:9 footage to 9:16. And whatever the source, the vertical frame has less usable area than its pixel dimensions suggest, because the platform draws its interface inside it.

Mistakes That Survive a Correct Spec

Uploading at the minimum. Platform recommendations for upload bitrate are higher than what would be needed to view the file, because the file is an input to their encoder rather than a delivery. Meeting the minimum hands over material that is already compromised. The reasoning is in how bitrate, resolution and quality relate.

Exporting from a preset built for a different project. Presets carry resolution and frame rate along with codec settings. A preset from a horizontal project applied to a vertical timeline produces a letterboxed file that technically meets every specification and is useless.

Delivering an editing codec. ProRes and DNxHR files are enormous and most recipients cannot play them. This happens most often when someone selects the highest-quality option in an export dialogue without knowing what it means.

Ignoring loudness. A video delivered much louder or much quieter than the platform's target gets normalised, and the result is a mix that no longer sounds the way it did in the edit. Dynamics are affected, not just volume, and it is worth handling deliberately rather than discovering afterwards — the targets and what they mean are in audio loudness standards.

Assuming a spec transfers between surfaces. A platform's main feed and its short-form surface frequently have different limits, different aspect ratios and different behaviour around captions. Treat them as separate destinations, because they are.

Next Steps

Open a text file and write your own delivery sheet in two sections: the durable settings, which you will not check again, and the policy settings, with a date and a link to each platform's specification page. Put it in your project template folder so it travels with the work.

Then build one master export preset per aspect ratio, and stop rendering the timeline more than once per project. That single change removes most of the inconsistency between platform versions and most of the waiting. The surrounding delivery material sits under formats, specs and delivery.