Export is the one page where every earlier decision becomes visible to the audience. The settings that matter are fewer than the form suggests: container, codec, bitrate, loudness and colour tags.
For uploads, MP4 with H.264 is the safe floor: every platform and player accepts it, and quality at a sensible bitrate is indistinguishable from fancier options. H.265 shrinks files at the same look, with fewer players.
Bitrate is where quality and file size trade places. Uploads want a fat bitrate, archives want the master, and review copies want the lightest file that still reads as finished.
Loudness is the setting most often left wrong: mixes that clip, or vanish under the next video, miss the minus fourteen LUFS target the streaming platforms normalise around.
The reason to understand settings is to stop thinking about them: lock the recipe into presets per destination, and every future render is two clicks: choose the preset, press render.
Export settings questions that come up before a first render.
MP4 with H.264 at 1080p or 4K inside the bitrate bands above, audio at minus fourteen LUFS integrated. The platform re-encodes everything, so the goal is arriving clean rather than mastering.
H.264 plays everywhere and uploads fine; H.265 exists for smaller files of the same look, at the cost of heavier decoding on older players. Uploads stay with H.264 unless file size is a real constraint.
A light H.264 at 1080p will do: small enough to send, sharp enough to judge the cut. The master is for delivery day, not for the review round.
Colour shifts almost always come from tags, not encoding: export in the same colour space the footage was tagged with, and verify once with a test render before a big delivery.
The studio is one project with several pages. These are the pages that usually come before and after this one.
Open the studio, export a short test and lock the recipe into a preset; every future delivery becomes two clicks.
