Video Export Settings for Social Media: A Cheat-Sheet Mindset
Every platform re-encodes your upload, so the goal is not a perfect file — it is a file that survives the re-encode. Here is the practical export logic for vertical, square, and horizontal delivery, plus color and loudness traps that quietly ruin uploads.
Here is the fact that simplifies every export decision: no social platform shows viewers your file. Every platform re-encodes every upload into its own compressed versions. Your export is not the deliverable — it is the source material for the platform's encoder. Once you internalize that, the goal stops being "maximum quality file" and becomes "clean, correctly-shaped, generously-encoded file that gives the platform's encoder the best possible starting point."
That mindset replaces memorizing fifty preset numbers, which is good, because platform specs change quietly and often. What follows is the durable logic — shape, bitrate philosophy, color, loudness — plus a delivery table with safe ranges rather than false precision.