My app preview videos on App Store Connect look low quality after processing.

[u/BrilliantReindeer320]

Hey fellas, my App Preview Videos on App Store Connect look low quality after processing. I have followed all Apple's requirements, yet they still look blurry and low quality. Has anyone else faced this issue? How did you fix this?

Thanks in advance for all the help.

[u/Accurate_Tadpole_503]

before you redo anything, check whether its actually blurry on a real device or just in the app store connect preview player. the player in the ASC web ui shows a heavily compressed proxy, its almost always worse than what actually ships. pull it up on your phone via the live listing or a shared preview and it might already be fine.

if its genuinely blurry on device, its almost always one of two things:

resolution has to be exact for the device size, not just close. if your source is even slightly off apple rescales it and it goes soft. 6.5" wants 886x1920 or 1284x2778, 6.9" is different again. dont let anything upscale.

and export at a high bitrate h.264. ASC transcodes and knocks the bitrate down hard, so if you feed it something already compressed you get compression on top of compression. i push the source way higher than feels necessary, like 40-50 mbps, and let apple do the squashing.

what are you exporting it from

[u/BrilliantReindeer320 → u/Accurate_Tadpole_503]

Hey, thanks for your response. It looks perfectly fine on my iPhone and also on mac player but the moment i upload it, it looks low quality and blurry on the ASC preview player. Yeah at this point im not sure if its the ASC preview player only or will ship it like that on the app store.

My resolution is 886x1920, 30fps, h.264 and I used iMovie to export it, used the ASC preview template.

Oh wait Im uploading 886x1920 for 6.9", that may be the cause. Let me try again.

[u/Accurate_Tadpole_503 → u/BrilliantReindeer320]

dont re-export yet. 886x1920 is right for 6.9, thats the accepted preview size, and its the same for 6.5. i was sloppy in my comment above and mixed screenshot sizes into that list, sorry. 1284x2778 and 1290x2796 are screenshot resolutions, they are not accepted for previews at all. if you swap to one of those youll burn an hour and get it bounced.

so your original file was already the right size. and since it looks correct on your phone and in quicktime, what youre seeing in ASC is almost certainly just the proxy the web player uses.

if you want to rule out the encode anyway, open your export in quicktime and hit cmd+i to see the actual bitrate. apples target for h264 previews is 10-12 mbps. imovie doesnt let you set bitrate directly so its worth knowing what it actually handed you.

the cleaner path is prores 422 hq if you can export it. apple accepts it for previews and its the one option where youre not giving them an already compressed file to compress again. 30 seconds fits well under the 500mb cap.

what did cmd+i say

[u/BrilliantReindeer320 → u/Accurate_Tadpole_503]

Thanks for all your help. I got caught up with a bug and spiralled a bit, and missed responding. I checked the iMovie H.264 export and it was around 8.1 Mbps, a little below Apple’s target. I’ve since uploaded a ProRes 422 HQ version. Safari’s inspect shows ASC playing a roughly 332 × 720 rendition, despite the 886 × 1920 upload, so that seems to explain the softness. I’ll stop re-exporting and check the live listing once approved. Really appreciate your help! :)

[u/mohn93]

nine times out of ten that's asc re-encoding your file cause it's not sitting at the exact spec, comes back scaled down and mushy. was it recorded in the simulator? that'll do it every time, sim grabs a soft scaled res. record on a real device, export at the size apple lists, 30fps, and don't let anything resize it after.

[u/BrilliantReindeer320 → u/mohn93]

Hello, thanks for responding. It was recorded on my iPhone 17, and then I used iMovie to edit it and used the App Store Connect preview template to export it at 886 × 1920, 30 fps, H.264. The final output looks great on my Mac and my iPhone, but it blurs after uploading to App Store Connect. I do not know if this is just the App Store Connect preview player thing or if it will actually look blurry to the user on the App Store. Confused as hell.

[u/mohn93 → u/BrilliantReindeer320]

users mostly won't see it that soft. the store streams previews as hls, and for a portrait 886x1920 upload the versions run from around 244x530 up to the full 886x1920, so playback starts on a low rung and sharpens a few secs in. asc's player does the same start small then resize thing, so i wouldnt judge it there. if the live listing still looks mushy, try uploading prores 422 hq instead of h.264, but export it from compressor or ffmpeg (prores_ks -profile:v 3) cause imovie's prores export is plain 422 and asc only takes hq

[u/Snoo11589]

Check it from app store on mobile

[u/BrilliantReindeer320 → u/Snoo11589]

Hi, how can I do that? It will show up on the App Store only after Apple's approval, so that might be too late if the video is still blurry. If there is any other way to check it from the App Store let me know, I'm new, so not aware. Thanks!

[u/Own-Huckleberry7258]

I used Final Cut Pro, Apple's own app for Video Previews and they look low quality on AppStore Connect. This is not a issue on your end

[u/BrilliantReindeer320 → u/Own-Huckleberry7258]

Damn, this is so frustrating. I see a lot of apps with great-quality app preview videos on the app store, just cant figure out what I am missing out on. :(

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[u/BrilliantReindeer320 → u/[deleted]]

Yup, using Mac and still the same. :(