Export for Instagram

Now you've got your vertical video setup in your After Effects project and all you need to do is compress a file that you can then upload to Instagram.

Now it's important to note that Instagram won't let you upload through a traditional web browser on your laptop or computer or what have you, you have to actually use the app, which is usually confined to either a tablet or a cell phone.

So when we actually get these settings set up, I'm actually going to render mine to a cloud drive that I can then access on my smartphone or tablet device.

So to start, let's look at our animation.

If I double click on the Balloon_Insta comp and then press the space bar here, you'll see I've got my balloon floating up and stopping in the middle of my project.

I'll press the space bar to stop playback.

And to load this into a properly compressed format, I need to use Adobe Media Encoder.

So I'll go up under Composition and I'll choose Add to Adobe Media Encoder Queue.

That should bring media encoder to the front.

It may take a second for the app to actually launch if you didn't have it running already.

Now usually when I'm compressing things for social media I go to the preset browser here.

But I know if I go to the web video section under Social Media you can see I've got Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, and YouTube, but no Instagram.

So the way I get around that is to just come right here in the Queue section and the first dropdown here I'll click on it and make sure that we've chosen H.264.

Now the next preset, I'll click on the dropdown, I like starting with Match Source - High bitrate.

Then I'll go ahead and click on that blue text to open up the export settings.

And in here I wanna go to the Video section and scroll down.

And if we scroll down in the Video section here, I could set what's called a Target Bitrate for this compression.

And the most normally and widely accepted target bitrate for Instagram stories is 3.5.

Now the overall duration of the animation should not be over 60 seconds.

And if it is 60 seconds it will get divided up into four 15 seconds chunks.

Since this is so short, five seconds, we're good to go.

I'll go ahead and click OK and now I've actually got this loaded up.

Now all I have to do is specify where we're gonna save the file.

So just click on the blue text underneath Output File.

I'll render mine straight to the desktop and click Save.

So now, I can go ahead and render this.

And what's nice, as this is rendering, I could go back in After Effects and continue working.

But as you can see, that was very fast, because that was a very short animation.

Now since I rendered this file to my desktop, I can simply copy it to Dropbox or whatever your favorite cloud management service is.

And then you can go ahead and upload your video directly through Instagram.

Just remember, when you're compressing that file they're looking for H.264 at a compression setting of about 3.5 megabits.