Exporting

Pick the destination first

Platform preset in the toolbar. Choosing one sets the output size, whether the picture is cropped to fill or fitted with bars, the quality, and the safe areas drawn over the preview. The status bar describes what it just did.

Twelve are built in, covering Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Twitter and LinkedIn in their usual shapes. Leave it on Project canvas to export at whatever size your project is.

Several presets carry a maximum duration. If your timeline is longer, the description warns you and says what to do: set an In to Out range, or shorten the timeline.

The export dialog

Export in the toolbar, Export → Export, or Ctrl+E.

• What chooses the whole timeline or the marked In to Out range.
• Change Folder sets where the file goes. Export → Choose Output Folder does the same thing ahead of time.
• Filename.
• Format, the container.
• Quality.
• Encoding speed, which trades time against quality per byte. Slower is smaller for the same picture.
• Audio bitrate.

The dialog reports your canvas size, frame rate and sample rate underneath, so you can see what you are actually producing.

If export is unavailable, the dialog says why rather than leaving the button dead.

Hitting a hard file size limit

Open Advanced in the dialog. Turn on Target file size and enter your limit in Target size (MB). Muxing headroom (%) leaves a margin so the container overhead does not push you past the limit.

File size is bitrate times duration and nothing else. If the ceiling is 8 MB for a minute of video you have about 1 Mbps to spend, and no setting changes that arithmetic. When the target is tight, your moves in order of least damage are: shorten the piece, drop to a smaller platform preset, and denoise the source so the encoder is not spending bits describing randomness.

720p at 1 Mbps looks considerably better than 1080p at 1 Mbps. Resolution is the first thing to give up, not the last. See Getting it out the door.

Metadata

The dialog tells you whether source metadata will be stripped or retained. When it is stripped, any fields you edited are written afterwards, so your own metadata survives and the camera's does not.

The queue

Export → Show Queue. Every export, transcription and waveform render appears here with progress and a Cancel button. Work runs in the background, so you can keep editing while something renders.

A failure shows its error on the row rather than in a dialog you have already dismissed.

Batch and variants

Export → Batch and Variants. Two workflows share the dialog.

Template source replacement swaps one source file for another everywhere it is used, keeping your timeline trims, tracks, titles, captions and effects. Other sources stay in place. A replacement shorter than what it is replacing is refused rather than silently truncating your edit. This is how you make the same piece for ten different products.

Variants combines alternate openings, title text, end cards and platform sizes. You give it Replace opening (seconds), Alternate title text one per line, Alternate end cards one per line, and a Variant naming pattern. Every combination gets its own queue row and its own entry in a CSV manifest, so you know which file is which.

What happens during an export

Three passes. Each clip is normalised first. Then the picture is composited, with the transitions and overlays. Then the audio is mixed and the whole thing is encoded.

That is why an export takes longer than the piece itself, and why the result matches the preview rather than approximating it.

Check the file, not the timeline

Open the exported file and watch it. It is the last chance to catch a render problem, and it takes a minute. Check the first five seconds hard, the last two for a stray frame of black, and listen on a phone speaker.