Publishing a vertical clip
The file that comes out of the studio needs nothing done to it: 1080×1920, 30 fps, H.264 with AAC audio. That is the native format of Reels, Shorts and TikTok. No reframing, no bars, no re-encode.
Direct publishing to Reels from the studio is being built. Today you download and post by hand.
Post the file, not a copy of a copy
Upload the same downloaded mp4 to each platform separately.
Do not save a video out of one app and upload it to another. It gets recompressed twice, it usually carries a watermark, and every platform's algorithm treats a competitor's watermark badly. Thirty seconds of extra work per platform is worth more than any of that.
Check the crop option before you post. Vertical video is what these platforms want, but the upload flow sometimes offers a square or 4:5 preview by default and will happily cut the top and bottom off your frame. Pick the option that keeps the original.
Three minutes is a long time on a feed
Your clip is as long as your track. That is right for a music video and wrong for a feed.
We pulled apart 640+ videos from five accounts working in exactly this aesthetic. The videos that travelled were 7 to 24 seconds. Not because long videos are bad, but because the feed decides in the first second and rewards a complete idea that fits inside a scroll.
So publish twice from the same clip:
The cut. Fifteen to thirty seconds, opening on your strongest scene, ending on a punch. This is the post that goes out to strangers.
The full clip. Posted separately, pinned, or linked from the cut. This is for the people the cut brought in.
Making the cut is not extra work in the studio: approve only the scenes you want, reassemble — free — download, then re-approve the rest and reassemble again.
What travels, from the numbers
The same study, condensed:
- One idea per frame. The best-performing videos read in a second, with sound
off and without knowing the language. If you have to explain the scene, it is not the scene.
- Deadpan. Nobody in those videos winks at the camera. The absurd thing is
presented as if it were ordinary footage, and that is the joke.
- The analogue disguise works. Grain, VHS, direct flash, fisheye. The frame
reads as real, so the impossible thing inside it lands harder.
- Series beat singles. Recurring characters, part II and part III. In every
account we measured, the top ten videos took 44–68% of all views, and the gap between the best video and the median ran from 11× to 595×.
That last number is the important one and it is uncomfortable: you cannot aim at the hit. What you can do is publish enough, with a consistent cast, that when one lands there is somewhere for the audience to go. One clip a month is a lottery ticket. A recurring character posted weekly is a strategy.
Labelling a video as AI-made did not measurably hurt reach in any of the accounts we looked at.
About the music
This is the part that surprises people.
The platforms scan the audio of every upload for copyrighted recordings. If your track contains a borrowed beat, an uncleared sample, or a loop from a pack with restrictive terms, the video can be muted, blocked in some countries, or have its reach quietly limited.
It does not arrive as an upload error. It arrives later, as a notification in the account, and the first sign is often a video that simply does not perform.
If the track is fully yours, none of this applies. If it is not, know which parts are not before you build a release around it.
A caption that does something
Keep it short. Most platforms cut the caption at around 2200 characters, but the feed only shows the first line and that is the only one most people read. Put the idea there.
Hashtags: a handful of relevant ones. Past about thirty they stop being counted and start looking like spam.
Name the track and where to hear it in full. The clip is the advertisement; the song is the product.
A rhythm worth keeping
- One recurring character, so the clips accumulate instead of scattering.
- A short cut for the feed, the full clip for the people it brings.
- Publish on a schedule you can actually hold. Consistency compounds; a burst does
not.
- Keep the losers up. The 595× gap means the video that eventually breaks out is
often not the one you expected, and it is frequently an old one.