How to Create & Export Videos from Premiere Pro to IGTV

Premiere Pro 14/12/2018 4 min read

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to create and export videos from Premiere Pro to IGTV. It’s important for video professionals to stay up-to-date on all the latest social media trends, whether they’re a passing fad or here to say. IGTV is no exception to that rule.

If you’re new to the IGTV game or want to up your social video quality by using Premiere Pro CC features, creating and exporting video from Premiere Pro is easy — so how do you process and prepare your video to look amazing on the IGTV platform?

Part 1: How to Create a Video for IGTV in Premiere Pro 

Step 1: Set Up The Right Composition

Once you’re in Premiere Pro, you’ll want to start by setting up your composition in portrait mode, since that’s how IGTV videos play. You’ll want to do this by either starting a New Project or going to File > New > Sequence

Having your project in Portrait Mode means you need to flip the aspect 90-degrees. You can do this by changing your Aspect Ratio from 1920 x 1080 to 1080 x 1920. Or in other words, a vertical 9:16 aspect ratio. Keep in mind that this is the tallest ratio that you can make your video, while the boxiest ratio you can use is 4:5.

Step 2: Import Your Video

Next, you need to Import your video. 

When you drag-and-drop your video into Premiere Pro, it’s going to give you a heads up that the composition doesn’t match. There is no need to worry about it; just keep the sequence settings as they are. 

Step 3: Set Up Your Video

What you’re going to want to do instead, is figure out how to make your footage look best in this new composition setup. If you’ve filmed your videos in portrait style already, then your job is easy. But if you’ve got a horizontal video, we’ve got some suggestions for you to try out:

Zoom In

Does your video look okay by zooming in and keeping it centered? Depending on what and how you filmed, it’s possible to still have an aesthetically pleasing video with all your essential pieces of content in the center. But you might have to make some adjustments—if things slip in and out of frame, then you can keyframe your position to follow the objects and keep what you want centered.

Rotate Your Video

If that’s not the case, you can flip your video horizontal by rotating it 90-degrees. This will require your viewers to rotate their phone 90-degrees to view it, but depending on your audience, this could be an okay solution. Philip Bloom, for example, has been doing this on IGTV and we still love and respect his amazing videos, regardless of having to rotate our phones to watch.

Shrink Your Video

If neither of those options work for you, you can shrink your video to fit horizontally in the frame. To maximize your viewers’ experience, you can bring your aspect ratio down to the previously mentioned 4:5 for this option. You can do this by going to Sequence > Sequence Settings. Once you’re there, change the setting to 1536 x 1920, to give it that perfect 4:5 ratio.

Once your video lines up with the horizontal width, duplicate your footage and place one video directly on top of the other. For the bottom clip, you’ll want to bring it back to 100% or whatever completely covers the frame. 

Finally, go to your Effects and choose a Gaussian Blur, and place it on your bottom clip. Then increase the Blur to whatever suits your taste, and make sure to check the box for repeat edge pixels. 

Part 2: How to Export Your Video to IGTV

Step 1: Get Your Specs Right

Once your video is set up and looks the way you want it to, it’s now time to Export your video. Before we start the export, there are 3 things you need to know about videos for IGTV:

  1. Videos must be exported in MP4 format.
  2. Videos cannot be larger than 650 MB.
  3. Videos must be between 15 seconds (minimum) and 10 minutes (maximum) unless you’re a featured creator with a verified account, in which case the maximum time for videos is 60 minutes (with a max size of 3.6 GB).

With that in mind, our suggestion would be the internet standard of selecting H.264, which will create an MP4 file for you. Set your Bitrate to High, and as long as the video size will be below 650 MB, you are good to go. If your video size is larger than the maximum of 650 MB, decreasing the Bitrate should get you under the maximum size. 

We suggest keeping the Bitrate as high as you can without going over the maximum size. Each video will be different, so test it out and find what works for your project in particular!

Step 2: Upload Your Video to IGTV

Once you have exported your video, it’s time to upload it.

You can download your video right to your phone. But if you’re like us and happen to be working on a computer all day, it’s nice to keep your video projects on your computer and upload them there. Thankfully, IGTV has provided a way to upload videos directly from your computer. 

Before you can upload your video to IGTV, you need to create a channel. The process is simple — you simply need to go to Instagram.com and sign up. Once you’ve created an account, you can head to your Instagram profile and select the IGTV icon. From there click Upload, navigate to your video and upload it. 

It’s important to note that, in the past, people have experienced problems uploading their IGTV content from a PC as opposed to a Mac. While we don’t know why this is the case, we thought it important to note and share that you’re not alone. 


We hope you found this tutorial on how to create and export video from Premiere Pro to IGTV helpful. If you’re looking to improve your IGTV and Stories, check out our Premiere Pro Instagram templates. Now, all that’s left is to get creative and rock your social video content!