- In today's video I wanted to share some mistakes
that I often see beginners make when it comes to exporting
and uploading content for your Instagram reels,
for your YouTube shorts, for your YouTube, for wherever.
Today I wanted to run through
a bunch of different variables,
which can impact the quality of your content
or the perceived quality of your content.
So hopefully you can use this video to help you troubleshoot
so that you can be uploading better quality content.
All right, let's get stuck into it.
(lively music)
At the top of today's list
I really wanna talk about understanding the device
or the platform from which you are exporting.
Now this is super important
because if you have a mobile first workflow
you have less variables, less parameters
you essentially have less options
when it comes to exporting the content.
So, if you are exporting your content and you are just say,
transferring your GoPro footage to your to your smartphone
and then opening the GoPro Quik app
and then exporting it from there, this can work.
And I'm not saying that there is one hard and fast rule
as to how it must be done.
Yes, this can work, but when it comes to editing
on mobile editors in general,
most of them don't let you change the parameters
and tweak the exports.
They template the export settings to make it easier
for the user.
This can be a problem, because if you do want to create,
you know, a higher quality reel
or create something in a bigger workspace,
you don't have the ability to set up the workspace
as you would if you were to use a desktop editing suite.
So the first troubleshooting question
I think you have to ask yourself is,
have you been just working mobile first, mobile friendly?
You know, taking the content off your GoPro,
putting it in Quik, exporting from Quik,
and then uploading it,
because that could be your first problem.
The next mistake that I frequently see
when it comes to quality of perceived Instagram reels
or you know vertical content on the internet
is the shot itself.
Like if you go into the woods
with a GoPro or with an action camera
and it's really low light and you shoot a shot
which really doesn't let the tool do the best job
then no matter what settings you put in,
no matter what advice I give you, if you compare that shot
to someone who is in crystal clear water,
these things do not compare.
Even if both of those, you know, environments were shot
with the exact same settings,
the environment in which it was shot
lends itself to the tool.
If you're comparing someone's reel,
who's shot everything outdoors in full sun
to yours that's like in the woods in low light
then their quality will probably look better.
And that's just perceived
and that's just because the tool
is just gonna be able to achieve a better shot
than the shots that you have chosen.
So it's so important that,
if you want your your clips to look good
you have to vet them.
You have to go through and find the best quality clips.
And unfortunately, these platforms are a comparison site.
You do look at another reel and go
why doesn't mine look like that?
And you're only taking into consideration
like export settings, but export settings do not
supersede the work in the cinematography,
the work in the skillset that that creator
might have gone to, the lengths that they've gone to,
to make sure that each of those shots
are the best quality shot that they could provide.
As a beginner, let's not look at that.
Let's just think about how we can improve day by day
the quality of our shots, how we can make smarter decisions
as creators in terms of thinking about everything
that's in the shot, like a director would.
You know, have you looked at the image and gone like,
yeah, that's awesome.
It's, you know, really great lighting.
I'm getting some nice shadows.
You know, you're really stoked with what you are seeing
just in the viewfinder or just, you know,
in the GoPro itself.
If you're stoked on that, then yes,
we can make that look awesome on your Instagram reel.
Trying to upload crappy clips
or polished turds just won't look good.
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Third on the list is the edit
and understanding the tool itself.
So for those of you that do wanna improve the quality
I recommend editing on your desktop
and using a more professional editing suite.
Like moving away from templated editing suites
is your first step to creating high quality content.
So if you were to use something like DaVinci Resolve,
Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premier Pro, these are all eligible
and fantastic tools at setting a workspace
and giving you the flexibility to essentially
create the video frame size in which you want
to give it to Instagram to make it look good
or YouTube or wherever you're uploading it to.
When it comes to this, there's two things
that I want to touch on, and that is one,
if you've shot a lot of your clips in 16 x 9
in this aspect ratio and you are cropping into them
you're digitally cropping into those clips to fit them
into a vertical aspect ratio, a 9 x 16 aspect ratio
of course you are gonna lose quality
because each time you crop in
you are taking a portion of that clip.
So if you know that you're gonna be shooting
for Instagram reels, then why not shoot the video vertical?
You are instantly getting every single pixel
in the vertical aspect ratio that is going to make that clip
look way better when you come to edit it.
So that is probably the biggest qualm with beginners,
is one, not understanding that you can crop in
that you can just choose the section of the clip
so that you fill the workspace, you fill the frame
so it looks better on your reel or your short.
And the second thing is, actually shooting with intention
and knowing that if I capture this
and I use the image sensor vertically
I will have more pixels
in that shot to even crop in further to my vertical shot.
When it comes to setting up your workspace in Premier Pro
you kind of have two options.
Now you can either choose if you've shot
a lot of your content in 4K
and by 4K that is 2160 x 3840
that is a big like a 4k, a 4K 9 x 16 clip,
you can use that as your aspect ratio.
When it comes to editing
in Premiere Pro or Final Cut or DaVinci,
use the 4K vertical aspect ratio.
If you have the brand new version of Premier Pro
they also have a vertical editing suite
so you can just click on the vertical editing window
and viola, you can start to edit your clips in vertical.
When it comes to setting up your workspace
in your editing suite, I think there's two arguments here.
There is one, setting up a 1080 vertical workspace
or setting up the 4K vertical workspace.
Now each have their own pros and cons.
Now the 1080 workspace is really great for those of you
that have shot a lot of vertical content in 4K
that are punching in
that are cropping for the vertical space.
Now, the 4K workspace is really designed
for those of you that have intentionally shot a 4K reel
in 9 x 16 and you are using, you know
all of the pixels in that space.
You are essentially creating the biggest,
(beeping) shut up,
biggest possible frame size to edit your content in.
Personally, I choose to edit my reels
in a 4K vertical aspect ratio as opposed to the 1080 one
and I just upscale my smaller clips.
So this is really important to understand how to do
because this is gonna give you the tools
that you need to be able to improve your quality uploads.
In Premier Pro, this is super easy.
Just go up to the top and go New Sequence.
In the Sequence menu then you can then go to the Settings
and in Settings you can choose Custom.
So click on that little button there
and all we're gonna do now
is we're gonna input those frame sizes
which we've been talking about throughout this entire video
which is 2160 x 3840.
And you'll notice that that is a 9 x 16 aspect ratio.
You can name this, let's just call it
our 4K vertical workspace, okay?
Now, once you've got this set up in Premier Pro
and you're in the vertical editing window,
you might notice that your clips are all different sizes.
That's because some of the clips were shot in 4K
and others were shot in 1080.
So if you have a 1080 clip, you can go into the scale
and you can choose 200%, or you can just click
on the scale number and drag that up to 200%.
This is called upscaling your clips.
And the last area they wanna show you is the actual export.
So once we've got our reel ready
we're gonna go into the Video Settings
and we're gonna go to this little dropdown menu More
and we're gonna tweak our bit rate, the bit.
We essentially want this whole video file size
to be 150 megabytes, and we can do that
by changing the bit rate settings.
Now you'll see this is the estimated size down the bottom.
You're gonna either bring this target bit rate down
or up depending on your clip to match 150 to 170,
somewhere in the ballpark of 170 megabytes.
150 megabytes to upload to Instagram is perfect.
Now, the bigger this export,
the bigger the amount of megabytes,
the longer it will take to upload.
Instagram will let you upload up to 650 megabytes
for videos under 10 minutes.
But if this is a 15 second reel, let's keep it short.
Final tip in this video,
and you've probably already come across this
if you've checked out any of these videos
and that is just prepping Instagram to allow you
to upload higher quality uploads.
If you checked out Abe Kislevitz' video,
which he posted like a year ago,
he was kind of the first one I think
that brought this to a lot of creator's attention.
So shout out to Abe for letting us know about this
but basically you just have to jump into Instagram
and turn on high quality uploads.
Now, if you guys want a very simple export settings guide
we have listed one.
It's a free export setting guide
in the top link of this description.
You can just keep that and you know,
it's just gonna give you some ideas
and some thought starters
as how you can go about creating high quality uploads.
Obviously, we've gone through it here in this video
but yeah, feel free to keep that on your computer as well.
If this video has helped you guys
feel free to punch that thumbs up button.
And if you want to learn more about the editing process
or you wanna learn how you can create some cool,
fun stories, then I highly recommend
that you check out this video up here
which is sharing how we tell stories in 30 seconds.
All right, see you guys in the next upload.
Peace.
(upbeat music)