TD rendered video in Instagram posts

Not explicitly a TD issue, but I’ve had no luck researching the instagram side.

By some arcane magic, it seems a gamble whether audio/video clips I render in TD will post properly on Insta. The most common issue I’m running into is that they work fine, audio and all while preparing a post, but once posted show as “this post has no audio”. Only results on the instagram side are people with their phone audio muted.

I’ve tried multiple codecs, and directly downloading to my phone before posting, all with no luck. This is only a problem with videos rendered from TD.

Has anyone found a consistent set of settings that work?

One workaround is filming the screen, but the quality is awful that way.

2 Likes

I haven’t tried these settings in a while, but a few months back I sat down with the official Instagram specifications and made a media encoder preset that seemed to work great for some promos. Stories are 1080x1920, and posts are 1080x1080.

Format:
H.264

Video:
VBR, 2pass
Target 3.50 Mbps / Max 4.00 Mbps (Seems low, but instagram definitely re-encodes if you go over this)
Frame Rate 29.97

Audio:
AAC, 160 kbps, 44 Khz, Mono, Audio Quality:High

Render at Maximum Depth
Use Maximum Render Quality

2 Likes

Just did some more testing, and it seems like it’s the AAC codec that was causing issues.
I could swear I’ve used MP3 on insta with no issues before. And especially weird that it did still play while previewing/prepping the post.

Since TD doesn’t support AAC encoding directly, that adds an additional step of transcoding your audio, but not the wort thing in the world.

Any chance we’ll get AAC encoding in TD?

BUMP’

+1 I would really really really appreciate AAC audio codec.

2 Likes

Yeah I’ve had some issues with audio on TD renders with various delivery formats. iPhones in particular are really picky about what h264 profile you are using.

Typically my process is to render as animation codec and convert using ffmpeg like so:

	pfolder = project.folder
	filename = 'some_file_name'
	video = pfolder + '/edits/' + str(filename) +'.mov'
	outvideo = pfolder + '/exports/' + str(filename) +'.mp4'
	cmd = 'C:\\ffmpeg\\bin\\ffmpeg.exe -y -i ' + video + ' -vcodec libx264 -profile:v main -level 3.1 -preset slow -crf 23 -x264-params ref=4 -acodec aac -movflags +faststart ' + outvideo
	o = os.system(cmd)

Hi, how does the above code need to be run from ffmpeg? I try to use \ to add it as multiline but that doesn’t work.

1 Like

I have exactly the same audio problem when uploading video on Instagram, the insta preview work perfectly but once uploaded the audio is not there.

I had no success converting the video from H.264 & mp3 to H.264 & AAC using VLC.

Using ffmeg with the matthewwachter’s command line made the things even worse, since my samsung galaxy note cannot even read the converted files and so the insta preview. However, I am using a precompiled version of ffmpeg a bit dated: version 2.5.2 built on Dec 30 2014.

Matthew, did you rebuild ffmpeg from its sources in a more recent version?

@remi_arq Yeah that could be your issue. Generally I just download the latest from here: https://ffmpeg.zeranoe.com/builds/win64/static/

At the time I wrote my last reply I was probably using one of the 2019 builds.

@d1egosan if you’re trying to use ffmpeg from the command line you could just use it like this:

ffmpeg.exe -y -i "input.mov" -vcodec libx264 -profile:v main -level 3.1 -preset slow -crf 23 -x264-params ref=4 -acodec aac -movflags +faststart "output.mp4"

2 Likes