When I decided to go Instagram all the way I haven’t thought about technical specs for even a second. I created my account and started to upload random things in there – at least one picture a day – and for today I thought of trying to upload a short video, stop motion style. Edited the thing together in After Effects, rendered and tried uploading. Got an error saying “the type of video you’re uploading is not compatible with Instagram”. Ok, nice. How do I get a compatible one, then? Why isn’t this thing like YouTube, that you can send whatever you like and the conversion fixes all the issues? Would be too easy, I guess.
It wasn’t hard finding the proper specs for Instagram, though. Weirdly enough, the only way I got it to work was rendering through Premiere. Any file that came out straight from After Effects was “incompatible”. So, for the record, these are the output specs for Instagram:
VIDEO: H.264 format, 640×640 pixels, Square Pixels, 29.97fps.
AUDIO: AAC, 44.100 Hz Mono 64kbps
Pretty low quality for both video and specially audio (mono, seriously?), also, the 29.97 frame rate was an unpleasant surprise.
Just in case, I’m adding a download link for it here so you just need to import the preset back to Adobe Media Encoder and be on your way.