instagram compressing quality

[iwantaehelp]

instagram often compresses quality and it ruins my video quality! ugh! does anyone have sugesstions?

[Rick Gerard · Accepted solution]

Every website that streams video recompresses the footage you send. To get the best quality, always follow their recommendations. None of them have the time to analyze your video and adjust the settings for the best quality. Streamed video will always be 8-bit and almost always h.264.  You must create your design and expose your video with those limitations in mind. No subtle gradients without noise added, no thin lines, and no high contrast edges unless they line up with an even-numbered row or column of pixels. 

The video quality they stream also depends on your bandwidth speed. If I try watching web videos on my phone and I only have 1 bar, the video will probably be 360P. If I have 4 Bars of 5G, the same server, Instagram, Vimeo, YouTube, and all the rest, will send me HD or even 4K content. If you upload a 60fps video, most of your audience will see 30 fps at best. It's all about the bandwidth. Somebody has to pay for the bandwidth, and they are all about making money, not about delivering pristine content for their unpaid audience. 

It also takes time for all video providers to re-compress your video and make several versions available. Often, as soon as you upload, you will get a low-resolution playback, but if you wait for a few minutes, you'll get the best quality they will deliver.

I hope this helps 

[Mylenium]

As Rick already said, you have exactly zero control over these things. All you can do is design your artwork "to spec" and with those limitations in mind to minimize the damage, but be that Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or YouTube, they'll always recompress video to work within their system.

Mylenium