- Hey, guys, my name is Matt Johnson with whoismatt.com,
and today I'm gonna be showing you
how to export high-quality Instagram Reels videos
using Adobe Premiere Pro, and to save you time,
I've actually created a set of free export presets
for Adobe Premiere that are gonna give you
the exact settings that you need
to both edit and export videos for Instagram Reels.
You can download those presets
at the link down in the video description.
Welcome to Adobe Premiere.
First thing we need to do is create a new sequence,
and this sequence is gonna need
to match up with the resolution
and frame rate that Instagram uses for reels.
Make sure you're in the Editing tab up here.
This is the default layout,
and go down here and click
in the Project panel so it's highlighted,
and you can either press Control + N on PC
or Command + N if you're on a Mac
to open the New Sequence dialog box,
or you can go to File, New, Sequence.
With this dialog box open here,
you're gonna see that we have
a lot of options for a preset,
but we're actually going to customize our own.
So let's go over here to the Digital SLR preset.
1080p, and we're gonna select DSLR 1080p30.
With that selected, let's go up here to Settings,
and these settings look good.
Let's go here to Frame Size,
and this is where we're gonna start some customization.
For horizontal, we're gonna set it to 640,
and for vertical, we're going to set to 1,136.
This is the exact resolution
that Instagram plays back reels.
In my testing, I found that it's best
to export your video at the same resolution
and bitrate that Instagram plays it back at
so that Instagram doesn't have to compress
the video as much and it looks its best.
Next, you can see there are all these other settings,
but here's the good news.
They are good as they are.
So let's go down here, and let's click Save Preset,
and saving your preset is gonna make it very easy
for you to reuse this preset
over and over again whenever you're editing
Instagram Reels videos in the future.
Incidentally, if you download my free presets,
you don't actually have to save this preset
'cause you already have it.
Let's name this preset IG Reels
640x1136 29.97fps.
That way we can know what our settings are at a glance.
Click OK. This list is gonna repopulate here.
It takes it a second.
Scroll down, and under the Custom folder here
you'll see that you now have your IG Reels preset.
Let's go in here and name the sequence.
We'll call it IG Reel, and click OK.
We now have a new sequence,
and it's time to import some footage.
I've actually already imported a video clip here,
and you'll see that it's at 23.976 frames per second
at 1920 by 1080, so this clip actually does not match up
with the 29.97 FPS that our sequence is gonna be using,
but because I, and I know a lot of filmmakers,
record most things at 23.976 FPS,
I have not seen a quality difference
if you upload a video clip
at this frame rate to Instagram Reels.
So regardless of whether your clip is 23.976, 29.97,
or 59.94, 24 FPS, 30 FPS, or 60 FPS,
it really shouldn't matter.
Instagram's gonna convert it all to 30 FPS,
and it should look good.
Let's drag this video clip over here to the timeline now,
and, ooh, we get a Clip Mismatch Warning.
This clip does not match the sequence's setting.
That is okay. We're gonna click Keep existing settings.
Ooh, our video clip is now on the timeline.
"But wait a second, we got these big black bars
on top and bottom, Matt.
We gotta fix it, I want this thing to be
filling up the whole screen."
Here we go.
Go over here, click on the clip to make sure it's selected.
Go up to the Effect Controls tab in the top left,
and you'll notice here under Motion
you have Position and Scale.
Let's go over here to Scale first.
It's currently set to 33.3,
and let's start dragging up Scale,
and as I do that, you're gonna see
that the video clip is getting larger
and larger in the player.
Bringing that Scale up to 105 now makes it fill the frame.
Keep in mind though that depending on the resolution
of your footage, you may have to increase
the Scale larger or smaller to compensate.
Looking at my clip here,
the couple's a little bit on the left,
so let's go over here to Position,
and I'm gonna click-and-drag 320
and bring it over to about 340 or so.
Just bump 'em over just a little bit.
With that done, this video clip is ready to be exported,
so let's go down here and click once on the timeline,
and then I need to tell Premiere
where the beginning and end of the video is
that I want to have exported,
so I'm gonna go down here to the timeline,
and I'm going to click-and-drag to the left
so I'm at the beginning of my clip, and I'm gonna press I,
and then I'm gonna click again
and drag to the end of the clip.
If you're not quite sure where it is,
use the arrow keys on your keyboard.
Go right to there, very last clip that's visible,
and I'm gonna press O, so now Premiere knows
this is the clip that I want to export.
Lastly, I'm gonna press either Control + M on PC
or Command + M on Mac,
or I'm gonna go up to File, Export, Media,
and that's gonna open up the Export Settings dialog box.
First thing for Export Settings,
for Format, you're gonna want to make sure
that you have H.264 selected,
and for Preset, you're going to want to select
Match Source High bitrate,
because we're gonna customize a little bit of things here,
but Match Source High bitrate
is gonna get you really close to the settings that we need.
Here for Output Name, this is very important.
Let's click this here.
This is where you're gonna tell Premiere
where you want to save your video,
so make sure you save it
in a place where you know where it is
so you can find your exported video.
In this case, it's in this Demo folder.
That's great. I've called it IG Reel.
You can change it to a different name if you want to.
I'm gonna click Save.
So now I know that's where my video is being saved.
Scrolling down here to the Video tab now,
as long as your Width says 640
and your Height says 1,136, you're good.
If it does not, you can click this little checkbox here
to make these numbers editable,
and make sure this chain icon here has a slash through it
whenever you're editing these.
Same for frame rate. Make sure it's 29.97.
Click the check box if you need to change it.
Field Order, Progressive,
Aspect, Square Pixels 1.0 is great.
Make sure that you check Render at Maximum Depth.
That can help improve the video quality a bit.
Scrolling down here,
if you can select Hardware Encoding, do it.
That's gonna depend on your graphics card.
If you can't, don't sweat it.
Software Encoding's fine too.
Lastly, we can ignore the rest of this
until we get down here to Bitrate Settings,
and this is where things get really important.
If you upload an Instagram reel
and then download the video file,
you'll see that Instagram is playing
your video back at a bitrate
of approximately two megabits per second.
For Bitrate Encoding, we're going to select VBR, 2 pass,
and then for Target Bitrate, we're gonna set it to two,
and for Maximum Bitrate, we're gonna set it to three.
Next, go down and check Use Maximum Render Quality.
Going up here to the Audio tab,
now we have a few more things to modify.
Audio Format, AAC, Audio Codec, AAC,
48,000 hertz, Stereo, Audio Quality, High,
Bitrate, 320 kilobits per second
with a precedence for bitrate.
Those settings look awesome.
At this point, now you can save these settings
as an export preset so you don't have to go
through them every single time
that you're exporting a video.
That would be a pain.
So let's go up here to Preset,
and right here you have this little down arrow
that says Save Preset.
Let's click that, and then let's call
this IG Reels 640 by 1,136
29.97 FPS - whoismatt.
There we go, and let's click OK.
Ta-da, your export preset is now saved,
so any time that you want to export
a video for Instagram Reels,
you can go here, select the IG Reels preset,
and it will auto-fill all of these settings.
Lastly, you need to export this video,
and you have two options for how to do it.
You can either click Export
which is going to immediately begin export.
Your other option is to click Queue,
and if you do that, that's gonna open up Adobe Media Encoder
and export using that program so you can continue editing
in Adobe Premiere if you want to.
I'm gonna click Queue.
Adobe Media Encoder has now opened, and here's the project,
and I can click the green button here
to begin the export process.
Now let's talk about how to upload your finished reel.
You need to get it from your computer
to the Instagram app on your phone.
If you have a Mac, just use AirDrop.
It's gonna work super easily
and the quality is gonna be great.
If you don't have a Mac or don't want to use AirDrop,
you could also use a file-syncing service
like Dropbox or Google Drive.
Both of these companies offer a free account,
so you won't need to pay to get your video to your phone.
I personally use Google Drive,
so I'll show you how to use it here.
First, you're gonna open up the Google Drive website,
and then drag your exported video clip
to Google Drive and let it upload.
Then open the Google Drive phone app,
navigate to your video file,
select Send a copy, and then save your video.
Then you can open Instagram, swipe over to Reels,
browse to your video clip, and post it.
Voila, your story is now on Instagram
in the highest quality possible.
With that, thank you so much for watching.
If you did not get a chance to download
those Instagram Reels presets yet, completely free,
they're linked down in the video description
next to the like button.
Also, if you're interested in more videos
about Adobe Premiere Pro,
I would love if you would consider subscribing,
and I will link to a playlist
of all those Premiere Pro videos
down in the video description as well.
Thank you so much for watching, and have a great day.