Social media is a now-expected place for a lot of videos to live, especially if you are working with brands or just trying to throw up stuff for your personal projects.
It’s a way to start getting things in front of people. It’s also a totally different destination than the conventional distribution for projects, or even just YouTube.
That means new settings for getting it to look just right after upload. This is a fair bit of difference from your conventional formats which likely have built-in presets in Adobe Premiere Pro. Though if you want a hand with learning the settings you should check out this video by Patrick Fuller.
A major factor in prepping files for Facebook is a file size limit of 4GB—meaning you can’t just take your master and throw it up and assume the best. Theres also the fact that about 80% of all Facebook users are sticking to mobile only. And on top of that there are only a few key aspect ratios: 16:9, 4:5, and 1:1.
Shooting in traditional landscape 16:9 isn’t amazing for Facebook. Cropping it to 4:5 or 1:1 isn’t ideal since it can zoom in a bit too much.
Even just going direct for a 9:16 vertical ratio you will find out on Facebook it might get cropped to 4:5 on the timeline. To shoot well you should just leave a bit more space around your subject to make it better suited for cropping in post.
In Premiere Pro you’ll want to make a new sequence to work for Facebook. Sticking with about Full HD resolution if you want to go right for 4:5 that would be a resolution of 1080 x 1350 or for 1:1 it’s just 1080 x 1080. Be sure to save the preset for later.
Image Credit: Adobe
When you start working in the timeline you might get a prompt to correct the mismatched settings. Be sure to keep existing settings. Now just playing with scale and location on the clip you can get it cropped and looking right.
When your edit is done you are ready to export. Starting with the standard Facebook settings is a good place. You’ll have to be careful with bitrate and compression as you need to stay below that 4GB file size.
Patrick recommends a VBR, 1 pass with a target of 15 Mb/s. If you have captions you will also either burn them in or make a sidecar file. With these settings you should look good and have a decent-looking and compact file to upload.
Any tweaks you make for uploading to Facebook?
[source: Patrick Fuller]
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