Phone Editor Export Settings for a Clean 6E Club Upload

Why Export Settings Decide Processing Time

The moment an editor saves your video, most of the decisions that affect the upload have already been made. Every new upload goes through two stages. First the original file travels to the platform in chunks. Then an encoder makes the quality versions viewers stream: 360p, 720p and 1080p, plus thumbnail frames. Your export settings shape both stages.

• Format and codec decide whether every viewer can watch the original file before the encoder has finished. An MP4 with H.264 video and AAC audio plays in practically every browser right away. Files using other codecs are still accepted, but some viewers may not be able to play them until the quality versions exist.
• Resolution and bitrate decide the file size, which sets how long the upload takes and how much work the encoder has to do.
• Resolution also decides which quality steps your video gets, because versions are only made up to the height of your file.

None of this needs a computer. Phone editors usually show these choices on a single export or “save” screen, sometimes behind a settings or gear icon. Look for resolution, frame rate, a quality or bitrate slider, and a format or codec option.

Resolution and Frame Rate That Fit the Player

The player tops out at 1080p, so that is the export resolution to aim for. Its quality menu offers Auto, 360p, 720p and 1080p once processing is done, and the Auto setting moves between them as the viewer's connection changes. The table shows what each export choice leads to.

Vertical videos are welcome. Keep the editor's vertical canvas (often labelled 9:16) and export at its 1080p setting; vertical clips are shown on tall cards in lists rather than being squeezed into a wide frame. Avoid exporting a vertical clip on a wide canvas, which bakes black bars into the picture itself.

Frame rate

The encoder keeps the frame rate of your file, so whatever you export is what viewers see. The safe rule is to match the rate you recorded at. Most phones record at 30 frames per second by default, and some offer 60 for sport or fast movement. Exporting 30 fps footage at 60 fps does not add real smoothness; it usually just repeats frames and makes the file bigger. Going the other way, from 60 down to 30, is fine if you need a smaller file and the motion is not fast.

MP4 and H.264: Picking the Right Box in the Editor

A video file has two layers. The outer one is the container, which is the file type you see in the name, such as .mp4 or .mov. Inside it, the video and sound are compressed with a codec. The upload page accepts five containers, MP4, MOV, WebM, MKV and AVI, but the combination that behaves best is an MP4 container holding H.264 video and AAC audio.

The trap is a setting many phones and editors now switch on by default: H.265, also called HEVC or “high efficiency”. It makes smaller files, which sounds helpful, but many browsers cannot play it, so for some viewers the original stays unplayable until the encoder has made the standard versions. If your editor has a codec, format or “high efficiency” switch, choose H.264 or the most compatible option instead.

If the editor shows no codec choice at all, it is most likely exporting H.264 already, which is the usual default for an MP4 export. The file details in your phone's gallery or file manager often name the codec too, listed as H.264 or AVC.

Leave the audio on its default setting unless you have a reason to change it. If the editor lets you pick, AAC in stereo is the right choice. Also make sure the music or voice track is not muted in the timeline before you export, since a silent export cannot be fixed after upload.

Keeping the File Inside the Size Limit

Every file can be up to 4 GB and up to 2 hours long. The upload page checks both in your browser before it sends anything, so an oversized file is refused in a second rather than after an hour of uploading. One account can also send up to 15 files and 10 hours of footage in any 24 hours.

File size depends mostly on bitrate, the amount of data used for each second of video, and on the length. Many editors show bitrate as a quality slider with labels such as low, recommended and high, while others show a number in Mbps (megabits per second). A rough rule works for both: size in megabytes is about the bitrate in Mbps multiplied by the length in seconds, divided by eight. Ten minutes at 10 Mbps comes to about 750 MB, and ten minutes at 20 Mbps to about 1.5 GB.

Short clips rarely come near the limit at 1080p. Long recordings, such as a full talk or a match filmed in one take, are where it matters. If the editor estimates a file size before exporting, use it. If the file still comes out too big, lower the bitrate or quality slider one step, export at 1080p instead of 4K, or split the video into parts. Trimming silent or empty stretches at the start and end helps too.

Smaller files are also kinder to your data plan. When you are ready to send, the 6E Club upload guide covers the rest of the trip: the details form, visibility choices, and resuming an upload after the signal drops.

A Test Export Before the Real One

Before exporting a long video, export ten to twenty seconds with exactly the same settings and upload that first. It takes a minute or two and catches almost every problem while it is still cheap to fix.

1. Trim a short copy of the project, keeping a part with speech or music.
2. Export it with the settings you plan to use for the full video.
3. Upload it with the visibility set to Private, so nobody else sees it.
4. Open its watch page while the Optimizing badge is still showing. It should already play. If it does not, the export is probably not H.264, so check the codec setting before the real export.
5. Check that the sound is there, the picture is the right way up, and the framing is not cropped.
6. When the badge clears, open the quality menu. A 1080p export should list 360p, 720p and 1080p.

If all of that looks right, export the full video with the same settings and delete the test. If anything is off, change the one setting responsible and test again. The player itself, including quality, subtitles and playback speed, is covered in the 6E Club videos walkthrough, and every other guide is linked from the 6E Club home page.