P: Do not scale videos during export

Thank you very much for your response, ​@johnrellis.

Adobe seems to have recognized this issue as a bug. Please see the post by ​@Rikk Flohr-Retired:
https://community.adobe.com/bug-reports-674/p-do-not-scale-videos-during-export-664416?postid=7172400#post7172400

​@Rikk Flohr-Retired:

What is the current status of this issue? And could you please let me know why this bug has been marked as “Released” even though the problems are still present?

The exported file should retain the original pixel dimensions of the source video, regardless of whether the source video is portrait, landscape, or square.

That’s a sensible proposal, but it’s not what Adobe designed.  There are four built-in video presets, Max, High, Medium, and Low. They all export in landscape with aspect ratio 16:9 (width:height), except at the smallest source resolutions, which use 4:3 or 3:2.  Max has a maximum width of 3840, High of 1920, Medium of 1280, and Low of 480.

For source resolutions with different width:height aspect ratios, including portrait, LR adds borders to the sides or tops (e.g. "letterbox" for portrait). I think Adobe's intention was to fit the source video as large as possible inside the chosen export resolution, but as you've demonstrated and my bug report shows, LR often gratuitously makes the source video smaller.

In Adobe's terminology in this forum, a "bug" is when LR doesn't behave as was intended or designed by the developers.  If you want different behavior from what was intended by the developers, that's a "feature request". 

Your desired behavior, as desirable as it might be, clearly wasn't intended by Adobe. Thus, I recommend you post a feature request.

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​@Mathias32515695vfub Why does it say ‘Released’ here? The bug hasn’t been fixed.

There are three separate issues going on here that weren’t precisely disentangled.  My experience reporting bugs here for many, many years is that you have to provide precise, detailed steps of what you’re observing and what you expect to happen, in gory detail.

Issue 1: “A video with 1440x1080 pixels becomes 1280x720 pixels when exported.” This was fixed in LR 15.0, which increased the maximum output resolution to 4K. I think this is why this bug report was marked Released.

Issue 2: Exporting portrait videos still uses a target resolution lower than 4K. For example, exporting a 2160 x 3840 video produces a 1920 x 1080 video rather than a 3840 x 2160 video (sic).  I’ve filed a new bug report about this:

https://community.adobe.com/bug-reports-674/exporting-a-portrait-video-at-quality-max-chooses-the-wrong-target-resolution-1643374

Issue 3: The video export presets all specify landscape resolutions, and portrait videos are inserted into those landscape resolutions with black borders on the left and right (so-called letterbox format). I’ve observed there is ambiguity among apps about this -- in some apps, if you export a portrait video at “4K”, you’ll get 2160 x 3840, but in other apps (like LR), you need to explicitly specify the portrait dimensions you want to avoid letterboxing.

LR has always letterboxed exported portrait videos, so I think Adobe considers this “as designed” rather than a bug. But the obvious problem for users is that there are no portrait video export presets, which is a pain now that portrait cellphone videos are so prevalent.  

So if you want to avoid letterboxing, you should submit a feature request for portrait export presets.

Meanwhile, the Any Video Preset plugin provides portrait export presets that avoid letterboxing, e.g. export a portrait video without letterboxing at 2160 x 3840.

Why does it say ‘Released’ here? The bug hasn’t been fixed.

Is the bug (videos that are in portrait format (1080x1920 pixels) are scaled to 960x540 pixels) still present in Lightroom Classic 15.0? Unfortunately, I haven't had a chance to test it yet.

Exporting 4K videos should now be possible: "4K Video Export: When you're exporting videos, selecting the Max option now supports 4K videos." See: https://www.lightroomqueen.com/whats-new-in-lightroom-2025-10/

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Adobe never finished the implementation of video in LR Classic after LR 4, and I quite doubt they'll put in any more effort. While waiting for them to improve this, you could use the Any Video Peset plugin: