Best export settings for an iPhone video for Instagram?

Hi there,

Sorry for the noob question, but I just got Shotcut and am using it to combine audio recordings from a DAW with an iPhone shot video, and am experiencing a lot of difficulty retaining the original video quality/keeping the file size down.

Are there any export settings that just mimic the original video and don’t increase the file size? I don’t really understand why my videos are coming out 5 times the size of the original but with significantly LOWER quality… (video is 8 mb to begin with and 35mb if exported with codec at 100%, 30fps, 320p). I have mostly played around with variables from the default settings, like adjusting frame rate to 60mps (which I believe is what iPhone 6 shoots in), and increasing resolution (this just increases file size even more).

Basically I just want the video to be the same as it was before processing…Its for Instagram if that changes anything.

Any help would be greatly appreciated

More than likely your project/export resolution does not match the source video, and scaling can be reducing quality. Also, in general, editing will reduce quality of already lossy-compressed video because it is uncompressed and then re-compressed (typically also lossy) on export. However, if you are scaling, then it will add to the problems. You need to specify the resolution of the source videos and export.

Thanks for the reply. I don’t think I am scaling. The original video file (.mov) is 568x320 and so are my exported ones. Also I tried exporting using the H.264 setting which matches the original, instead of Youtube (I just used that because it was default), but the file came out even bigger (from 8mb to 100mb).

I’m trying to export an iPhone video from iMovie for use on Instagram. The video is 6 seconds long, and with the recommended Instagram settings of 640x640, I want it to be as high quality as possible. It’s a very simple video of one person talking.

Any suggestions for which compression settings I should choose? I’ve been using QuickTime but there are so many options that I’m not sure which to choose.