Export Settings for YouTube, Shorts, TikTok & Reels: A Practical Guide

Nothing deflates a finished visualizer faster than the platform it lands on. You render a crisp file, upload it, and the feed serves back something soft, blocky and letterboxed. None of that is bad luck — every platform re-encodes every upload, and what survives depends almost entirely on whether you handed it the shape, size and quality it expects. Get those three right and your export makes the trip intact.

This guide collects the numbers that matter for YouTube, Shorts, TikTok, Reels and square feed posts, then walks through how the Novus exporter itself works so you know exactly what you are uploading. Everything renders in your browser — free, watermark-free, as MP4 or WebM, up to 4K on desktop and 1080p on phones.

Aspect ratio comes first

Choose the destination before you design, because aspect ratio is a composition decision, not an export toggle. A wide 16:9 scene cropped to vertical loses two-thirds of its frame — usually the two-thirds where the interesting motion lives. Working at the target shape from the start lets you put the action where the platform will actually show it: centered and tall for a phone screen, spread wide for a TV or desktop player.

Some looks re-compose more gracefully than others. Center-anchored modes — Pulse Orb, Warp Field, a mirrored waveform — read well at any shape because the energy radiates from the middle. Wide, horizon-style modes like the linear equalizer or Frequency Ridge are built for 16:9 and feel cramped when squeezed vertical.

YouTube: 16:9, as large as you can render

Standard YouTube videos are 16:9 — 1920×1080 at minimum, and 3840×2160 (4K) if you are exporting from a desktop. Uploading 4K is worth it even when most of your audience watches at 1080p: platforms typically route higher-resolution uploads through their better codecs and more generous bitrate tiers, so a downscaled 4K master usually looks cleaner than a native 1080p upload of the very same scene.

Both 30 and 60 fps are fully supported everywhere. Visualizers are pure motion, so 60 fps flatters fast scenes — particles, tunnels, anything with shake — while 30 fps is perfectly fine for slow ambient looks and halves the encoding work. On bitrate: a clean 1080p file at 30 fps usually sits around 8 Mbps, 1080p60 around 12 Mbps, and 4K from roughly 35–45 Mbps. Treat those as sanity checks for anyone re-encoding in another tool — the exporter's own output is written to look good without you configuring anything.

Shorts, TikTok and Reels: 9:16

All three short-form feeds want full-screen vertical: 1080×1920. The number-one mistake here is not resolution — it is ignoring the interface. TikTok and Reels stack captions, buttons and usernames along the bottom and the right edge, so anything important living there gets buried. Keep the focal point centered and let the outer edges be atmosphere: a centered Sunburst, Particle Vortex or Word Wave title treatment sits exactly where every platform leaves the view clear.

Length limits shift over time (Shorts currently allows up to three minutes), but short-form is a hook economy regardless: the first second should already be moving. The video starts where your track starts, so upload a cut of the song that opens with energy rather than four bars of quiet intro.

Square and other feed shapes

1:1 at 1080×1080 still earns its place for feed posts, loop teasers and anywhere a grid crops your video into a tile. Square is the diplomatic shape — nothing gets prime placement, nothing gets destroyed — which makes it a reasonable single-render compromise when you truly cannot make a second export. But exports here cost nothing, so the honest recommendation is: make the second export.

How the in-browser exporter works

Novus has no render farm. The same engine that draws your live preview renders the export frame by frame in your browser and encodes it to MP4 or WebM on your machine. That design has three practical consequences. Your track and your video never touch a server — nothing goes anywhere until you post the file yourself. Export is free with no watermark, because there is no per-render cloud bill to recover. And because beat sync is fully deterministic, the export matches the preview byte for byte: a hit that lands on a downbeat in preview lands on the identical frame in the file, every render, every time.

Resolution follows the device. Desktops export up to 4K; phones cap at 1080p, which — not coincidentally — is exactly what the vertical platforms deliver anyway. If you are curious how far a phone-only workflow can go, that is its own post: the mobile visualizer workflow.

The pre-upload checklist

1. Watch the whole file once, full-screen — not just the first ten seconds. Encoding artifacts love to hide in the loudest section.
2. Spot-check three beats — one near the start, one at the biggest drop, one near the end — and confirm the hits read the way they did in preview.
3. Check the edges at the target shape. On 9:16, keep anything essential out of the bottom quarter and the right rail where platform UI stacks.
4. Confirm the shape matches the destination. A letterboxed upload is the fastest way to look wrong in a vertical feed.
5. Play it muted. Most feeds autoplay silent — a good visualizer still looks alive with the sound off.

If you have not made your first export yet, start with the ten-minute path — from template to export in ten minutes — and come back here to tune the numbers. Still choosing a look? The template gallery previews every engine and mode in place.