Home → Best Export Settings for Premiere Pro for YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok
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JG McQuarrie

May 06th, 2023

Best Export Settings for Premiere Pro for YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok

Best Export Settings for Premiere Pro

With so many different platforms available on the internet these days, the volume of content can be overwhelming for a viewer. If you are a content creator as well, it can be even more so. 

Each platform has its own way of doing things, and of course, no two are ever quite the same. But you want your content to look as good as possible regardless of which platform you are posting to.

With YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram being three of the most important platforms for content creators to get their work on, choosing the right export settings can make the difference between your content really shining and just getting lost in the mix. 

So if you are using Premiere Pro, here are the best settings to ensure your content looks as good as possible.

How To Set The Best Export Settings

Selecting the best export settings is a really important part of the process of producing content. However, the first thing to do even before you start thinking about your settings is to ensure that you set your in and out points in Adobe Premiere Pro.

If you are going to render an entire video then you can simply select the whole of the video and then you’re good to go.

If you are only rendering part of it — for example, if you want an excerpt to use as a trailer — then you need to mark this. Put the playhead to the position you want your excerpt to begin, then press I. Next, move the playhead to where you want the excerpt to stop and press O.

Adobe Premiere Pro will then mark the part of the video grey in the timeline, so you know what part of the video will be rendered. 

Once this has been done you need to think about which platform you are exporting to. Knowing the best settings for your export is dependent on knowing where your video will end up. Even if you want to post the same video to different platforms you will want to use the correct setting for each platform, so you may need to render your video more than once. While this is time-consuming, it will ensure your content always looks its best. 

Best Export Settings for Premiere Pro

YouTube Export Settings

  • YouTube Video Export Settings

    Firstly, go to Format Setting Options. To export video for YouTube, you want to choose the H.264 setting. This will provide the best video quality format for YouTube.

    Next, you want to select a preset. For this, YouTube 1080p Full HD would be the best option to go for. Once you have selected this, you can customize the template to ensure it’s delivering the quality you require.

    At this point, make sure you tick the box to customize both audio and video.

    You can now set the bit-rate and basic settings for video. For the frame rate, choose 23.976 with a resolution set to 1080×1920. This resolution is portrait, meaning the video is taller than it is wide. This is what you get if you hold your phone vertically. If you shoot your video in landscape, holding your phone on its side, then reverse these settings and set the resolution to 1920×1080.

    Bitrate encoding can then be set to VBR, 2 Pass. Select 15 for the Target bitrate settings and the Maximum Bitrate can be set to 50.

    Make sure you select the option Use Maximum Render Quality to ensure the best exported video file quality.

  • YouTube Audio Export Settings

    For the audio settings, firstly choose the AAC audio codec, and set the bitrate at 48000Hz.

    Audio Quality should be set at High. If you only have speech, for example, like if you are providing a video version of a podcast you can choose Mono for channels. If you have any kind of music, or sound which has a directional component, please choose Stereo for the best stereo audio quality.

    The bitrate setting should be 320.

    And that’s it! These settings will optimize your video and audio for YouTube.

TikTok

  • TikTok Video Export Settings

    TikTok’s growth has been relentless and it has become one of the major video content providers worldwide. That means it’s a really important place for content to sit, and therefor it’s vitally important that your videos look their best on it. The export settings for TikTok are as follows.

    As with YouTube, select the H.264 format for the first of the video export settings. This will ensure the best quality without generating a file that is too large in size.

    Ensure you select the correct location for your video to export to.

    For the Basic Video Settings, choose the frame size of 1080×1920. You will notice this is a portrait resolution, as resolution is always arranged as width x height. The vast majority of content on TikTok is shot in portrait, so these settings are ideal. 

    Ensure that the Render At Maximum Depth option is selected.

    Under the Bitrate Encoding Section, select CBR. The Target Bitrate should be set at 15Mb/s which will provide a suitably good video quality to file size ratio.

    Make sure that you select the Maximum Render Quality option selected to ensure the best quality export from Adobe Premiere Pro.

  • TikTok Audio Export Settings

    For the best audio export settings, you can choose AAC. This will be more than sufficient for the audio quality that TikTok supports.

Instagram

  • Instagram Video Export Settings

    As Instagram develops as a platform and moves slowly from videos to Reels, its importance to content creators continues to go.

    For Instagram, you want to set your frame rate to 30.00 FPS. When video files are uploaded to Instagram they are automatically converted to 30.00 FPS anyway so it makes your life easier to have the video already in this frame rate. That way, you can spare yourself Instagram’s auto compression.

    The frame size should be 1080×1920.

    For the format, choose H.264 and for Match Source choose High Bitrate.

    Ensure that Render is set to both Maximum Depth and also Maximum Render Quality.

    For the Bitrate Encoding choose VBR, 2Pass, with a Target Bitrate of 2Mbps and a Maximum Bitrate of 3Mpbs.

    Once you have these settings you can also save them as a Preset so you don’t need to manually configure them every time you need to export to Instagram.

  • Instagram Audio Export Settings

    For Instagram audio, choose AAC, which is going to provide the best audio format you can have when posting video to Instagram. 

    Understanding the difference between AIFF vs AAC is crucial as it allows individuals to make informed decisions when it comes to audio quality and compatibility.

Conclusion

The importance of video content on the internet is only going to grow and grow. With major platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube finding new and innovative ways to reach new users, their significance and influence will only continue.

This means if you want to be along for the ride, you want your video content to look the best it possibly can on the world’s major platforms. And now you have all the best export settings for Premiere Pro you can achieve exactly this!

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