Exporting VJ Loops: Presets, Codecs, and Settings That Survive the Destination

Export is where a good-looking preview becomes a file somebody else has to play. The settings that matter depend entirely on where it is going, so this guide is organised by destination rather than by dialog.

Start from a preset

The export dialog ships presets that set resolution, framerate, container, and codec in one click:

Pick the closest one, then change only what you need. Everything remains editable afterwards — the preset is a starting point, not a lock.

By destination

A club, a projector, or a media server

Use VJ Loop (ProRes-grade), or a custom size matching the venue’s playback resolution.

The reason for the high fidelity: your file will probably be decoded, scaled, and possibly re-encoded before it reaches the screen. Every one of those steps costs quality, and they compound. Starting from a Master-tier file means the loss is invisible; starting from a Good-tier social-media export means it is not.

Deliver H.264 in MP4 unless you have confirmed the playback machine handles HEVC. Venue hardware is conservative and often older than you expect.

An LED wall

Export at the wall’s native pixel count using a custom resolution. LED walls are rarely a standard size — 1408×768 and similar odd dimensions are normal — and scaling a 1080p file to fit costs sharpness on a display that has very little to spare.

Two further points specific to LED:

• Keep the detail coarse. A 10 mm pitch wall cannot resolve a fine lattice. Reduce effect density before exporting rather than hoping the processor handles it.
• Watch the black level. LED panels produce genuine black, so high-contrast neon looks superb — but any noise in the dark areas is also fully visible. A Master-tier encode suppresses it.

See the LED workflow guide for the full treatment.

YouTube

Use the YouTube presets. They match what the platform re-encodes to, so you are not paying for bits that get thrown away. 4K60 uses HEVC because YouTube accepts it and it halves the upload for the same quality.

Upload at 60 fps if the content moves — tunnel and strobe content at 30 fps judders noticeably after the platform’s own encode.

Instagram, TikTok, Reels

The square and vertical presets handle the framing. One composition note: a tunnel composed for 16:9 loses its corners in a 9:16 crop, and the vanishing point ends up too high. Set the project to the vertical size and check the framing before exporting rather than cropping afterwards.

A GIF

Choose the gif container. Bitrate and codec settings do not apply. Keep it short, small, and low-motion — GIF has no interframe compression, so a 10-second 1080p loop will be enormous and look worse than the MP4 it came from.

Quality

Instead of a fixed bitrate, exports are controlled by a quality tier:

• Draft — the fast check-render tier: smallest files, softest picture.
• Good — a compact default for social delivery.
• High — the platform-preset default: sharp, sensible file sizes.
• Master — the highest fidelity the encoder offers, for venues, media servers, and any file that will be re-encoded later.

Each tier is a CRF value — the encoder is told “keep this quality”, not “use this many bits” — so the same tier scales naturally to any resolution. A Master-tier 8K render simply costs more disk than a Master-tier 1080p render.

The bitrate box still exists for a specific ceiling: if a file must fit under a size limit, work backwards — target bits = size in megabytes × 8 ÷ duration in seconds, then subtract a little for audio — and type that number in.

Audio

If the project has a song, it is muxed into the finished file. This is what you want for a social clip and usually not what you want for a venue loop, where the audio will come from the DJ. There is an option to leave it out — the song still drives the in-app timeline and the effect reactions, it just does not end up in the render.

Remember that an export analyses the audio file offline rather than sampling a live input, so the reaction in the file is deterministic and repeatable. See the audio-reactive guide for why the render and the live preview differ.

Looping

Nothing special is required. Effect motion is derived from the project’s loop phase, so the last frame continues into the first exactly. The traditional fixes — crossfading the ends, trimming a few frames, freezing the last frame — all make a seamless loop worse here, because they introduce a discontinuity where there was none.

If a loop does appear to jump, the cause is almost always a clip on the timeline whose own content is not loop-length, not the effect.

A quick checklist before you render

1. Is the resolution the destination’s actual resolution?
2. Is the framerate what the playback chain runs at?
3. Is the codec one the playback machine has definitely decoded before?
4. Is the quality tier set for what the destination can handle (Master for re-encodes, High or below for direct social delivery)?
5. Should the song be in the file, or not?
6. Have you looked at the loop point once, at full size?

Where to go next

• Send visuals live instead — Spout and NDI into Resolume, OBS, and TouchDesigner.
• Preparing video for an LED workflow — pixel pitch and contrast.
• The complete effect gallery — all 124 effects.