What are the best export settings for YouTube?
Most "my video looks worse after upload" problems are an export problem, not a camera problem. Here are the settings that survive YouTube's compression, and the two numbers people always get wrong.
By Thomas, founder of CutScore · Updated June 2026
Here is the thing nobody tells you when you start: the file you upload is not the file people watch. YouTube takes your export, runs it through its own encoders, and serves a brand new version it built to fit the viewer's screen and connection. Your job at export is not to make a perfect file. Your job is to hand that encoder enough raw material that the version it builds still looks like the one you made.
I learned this the slow way. Early on I shot something I was actually proud of, exported it at whatever bitrate the preset defaulted to, uploaded, and then sat there wondering why the gradients in the sky had turned into a stack of muddy bands and the fast pans smeared. The camera was fine. The edit was fine. I had simply starved the export, and YouTube finished the job. Most "it looked worse after upload" stories end exactly there.
So the settings below are not about chasing some imaginary maximum. They are about surviving the second compression that happens after you click upload. Get them right once, save a preset, and you mostly never think about this again.
The export settings for YouTube, in one table.
Set these once in your editor's export window, save them as a preset, and reuse them. The values below match what YouTube itself recommends for uploads, padded a little because a generous file always wins.
| Setting | What to use | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Container | MP4 | The universally accepted wrapper. MOV works too, but MP4 is the safe default. |
| Codec | H.264 | Encodes everywhere, uploads cleanly. H.265 is fine but offers no real upside here. |
| Resolution | 1080p or 4K | Match your footage. 4K source gets a better codec from YouTube, so keep it 4K. |
| Aspect ratio | 16:9 | Standard for long-form YouTube. Shorts use 9:16, which is a separate export. |
| Frame rate | match your source | 24, 30 or 60 fps. Whatever you shot at. Do not convert it on export. |
| Bitrate (1080p30) | 8 to 12 Mbps | Higher than you expect, because YouTube compresses again on its side. |
| Bitrate (4K30) | 35 to 45 Mbps | 4K needs roughly four times the data of 1080p to hold detail. |
| Audio codec | AAC, 48 kHz | Stereo, 384 kbps is plenty. 48 kHz is the video-standard sample rate. |
| Loudness | ≈ −14 LUFS | YouTube normalises toward this. Land near it so nothing gets turned down hard. |
| True peak | ≤ −1 dBTP | Leaves headroom so the audio does not crackle after the re-encode. |
| Color | Rec.709, 8-bit | Standard SDR space. HDR is a separate, more involved pipeline. |
Bitrate, frame rate, loudness, resolution: CutScore reads them straight off your file and flags the ones that will not survive upload, before you waste an export.
Four settings worth understanding, not just copying.
1. Bitrate: hand the encoder more to work with
Bitrate is how much data per second your file uses, and it is the single setting that decides whether your video survives YouTube. A low bitrate looks fine on your desktop and then collapses after upload, because the platform re-encodes a thin file into an even thinner one. Aim high: your audio peaks are not the only thing with headroom, your picture needs it too. For 1080p60 push to 12 to 18 Mbps, and for 4K60 you are looking at 53 to 68 Mbps. There is a fuller breakdown in what bitrate to export at if you want the per-resolution numbers.
2. Resolution: 4K source beats 1080p, even on a 1080p screen
This one surprises people. If you shot in 4K, export in 4K, even if you assume nobody watches above 1080p. YouTube assigns a better codec (VP9 or AV1) to 4K uploads, so a 4K file watched at 1080p often looks cleaner than a native 1080p upload. If your footage is only 1080p, upscaling to 4K buys you almost nothing real and just bloats the file. Match the resolution to your source, and read the best resolution to upload to YouTube for the full reasoning.
3. Frame rate: match what you shot, do not convert
Export at the frame rate you filmed at. If you shot 24 fps, deliver 24. If you shot 60, deliver 60. The mistake is forcing a conversion at export, say 24 to 30, which produces a faint stutter or judder that viewers feel even if they cannot name it. YouTube happily serves 24, 25, 30, 48, 50 and 60 fps, so there is no reason to fight your source. The detail on picking and keeping a rate lives in what frame rate to use.
4. Audio: the export setting everyone forgets
Picture settings get all the attention, then the audio export tanks the whole thing. Encode AAC at 48 kHz, and mix toward −14 LUFS for YouTube with a true peak no hotter than −1 dBTP. Why the −14 target? Because YouTube normalises loudness, and if you deliver at −22 LUFS your video sounds timid next to the next one, while a hot master gets turned down and can distort. Land in the right window at export and the platform leaves your sound alone.
Here is a real CutScore report on an everyday video: resolution, bitrate, frame rate and loudness all read off the file, scored, with the exact fixes.
If you only fix three things.
Most of the gap between "soft after upload" and "looks like the file I made" comes from these three. Fix them first.
Why it can still look soft, and what to do.
Even with a clean export, the first few minutes after upload can look rough, and that is normal. YouTube serves a low-resolution version while it finishes processing the higher-quality codecs in the background. Wait, then check the published video at full resolution on the actual player, not the preview thumbnail and not your desktop file. If it still looks worse than your export, the usual suspects are a bitrate that was too low or a frame-rate conversion you did not mean to make.
There is one more honest truth here. No export setting fixes a problem that was already in the footage. If the shot was soft, or the audio was quiet, or the gradient was banding before you exported, YouTube will faithfully preserve that and then add its own compression on top. Export is the last gate, not a repair shop. I dig into the full mechanism in why video looks worse after uploading, and into the platform side specifically in whether YouTube compresses your video and how to fix it.
Read the file by hand, or have it read for you.
Read the metadata yourself
Free and exact. A tool like MediaInfo opens your exported file and shows resolution, codec, bitrate, frame rate and audio format. The catch is you have to know what good looks like for every line, and remember to do it on every single export. Easy to forget at 1am.
Trust your editor's preset
Convenient, and right about half the time. The preset labelled "YouTube 1080p" in your editor is often tuned conservatively on bitrate, and it never checks your loudness. Build your own preset from the table above and it gets a lot more reliable. It still will not catch a bad mix.
Let a coach read it in one pass
Hand the file (or a link) to CutScore. It reads resolution, bitrate, frame rate, codec and loudness off the file, checks them against the right platform spec, and returns a 0 to 100 score with the exact fixes. No metadata reader to decode. See a sample report.
Frequently asked.
Stop guessing before you export.
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