How to get IGTV videos not be blurry on instagram

October 27, 2018 10:32 AM

Hi, I posted a video on instagram, instagram stories, and now IGTV and they come out slightly blurry. Before I post they are not blurry, so I don't know how to fix this. I take the video from an I-phone 8 plus. The phone setting is 4k at 30 fps. All I do is take the video and then download the video onto instagram from my photo library.

People on social media say its about the compression, but I'm not moving the video back and forth to a computer. I'm just taking the video, which looks good in 4k and then sending it to instagram. Do you guys have some hacks I can do to fix this. I would not say they end up super blurry, but there is definitely a blur. I really wanted to put them on IGTV but don't want to have poor quality videos on there.

Thanks.

posted by lynnie-the-pooh to Technology (4 answers total)

Instagram compresses it when you upload it. That is just how it works. What format are they?
posted by DarlingBri at 11:10 AM on October 27, 2018

Response by poster: Instagram says it uses format MP4 video file and it should have these specifications H.264 Codec. AAC audio. But when I look up settings on my phone (under the phone camera) it only tells me I have a 4K phone at 30 fps. I don't know how to look and see those other specifications.
posted by lynnie-the-pooh at 11:34 AM on October 27, 2018

Instagram does not support 4k UHD (3840x2160 pixels) video. In fact, Instagram does not even support 1080p. Instagram displays video at at a maximum of 1200x673 pixels, which is actually a bit less than even 720p (1280x720). When you upload a 4k video, Instagram downsamples and recompresses it at a much lower resolution. That's why it looks soft.

They do the same sort of thing with still images. Instagram is hell on image quality. If you care about image quality at all, Instagram is a terrible platform for your content.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 12:02 PM on October 27, 2018 [1 favorite]

H.264 and mp4 are just a codec (an algorithm for compressing and redisplaying raw video footage, similar to jpeg encoding for stills) and a wrapper format (which packages in the encoded data for presentation to the media player). There's nothing wrong with them—they're widely supported and reasonably efficient—but they don't tell you anything about the image quality of the video. You can encode H.264 video at whatever quality level and resolution you like, just like JPEGs can be any resolution you like and range from crystal clear to so full of compression artifacts as to be unintelligible.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 12:07 PM on October 27, 2018 [1 favorite]