Export: five presets, no watermark, on any plan

The export sheet

Tap Export and you get a list, not a wizard. Each row is a preset; underneath them sits Export photo (current frame); underneath that, the footnote: No watermark. Encoded with your device's hardware codec.

Which preset to pick

Vertical projects export at the matching vertical dimensions — the numbers above are the landscape equivalents.

If you are unsure, pick 1080p. Every platform accepts it, it plays on everything, it uploads quickly, and social platforms re-encode aggressively enough that a 4K master often arrives looking no better than a good 1080p one.

Choose 1080p high when the footage has a lot of fine detail or fast motion — rain, leaves, crowds, sport. The extra bitrate goes exactly where compression artefacts would otherwise appear.

HEVC versus H.264

The short version: HEVC to keep, H.264 to send. A 4K HEVC file is excellent on your own drive and a support request waiting to happen when you message it to a relative with an eight-year-old laptop.

What hardware encoding buys you

Every phone, tablet and computer ProCut runs on has a dedicated video encoding block in silicon. ProCut uses it through each platform's native stack — media3 and MediaCodec on Android, AVFoundation on Apple hardware, Media Foundation on Windows — rather than encoding in software.

Three consequences you notice:

• Speed. Export is typically a fraction of the timeline's duration, not a multiple of it.
• Battery and heat. A dedicated encoder uses far less power than pushing the same work through the CPU.
• Consistency. The same file comes out whether you exported from the phone or the tablet.

Export photo

The last row grabs the frame under the playhead as a still image at full project resolution. Useful for a thumbnail, a social post that accompanies the video, or simply pulling one good frame out of a clip — including a frame from the middle of a speed ramp, where no such photo ever existed on the camera roll.

What each destination actually wants

About that watermark line

It is worth being explicit, because so many apps in this category are not: ProCut does not burn a watermark into any export on any plan, and there is no resolution cap behind a subscription. The free tier gives you clean 4K files. What Pro changes is covered in the pricing post — and it is not this.

Resolution is not the only thing that matters

People treat resolution as the quality dial, but for most footage the bitrate does more visible work. Resolution is how many pixels there are; bitrate is how much information each second of video is allowed to keep.

That is exactly the gap 1080p high exists to fill. It has the same pixel count as 1080p and simply spends more data on it. Where that shows:

• Fine repeating detail — leaves, grass, hair, brickwork. These are the first things a low bitrate turns to mush.
• Fast motion — sport, handheld pans, anything where most of the frame changes at once.
• Smooth gradients — skies and studio backdrops, where too little data produces visible banding.
• Grain and noise — low-light footage costs a lot of bitrate to encode faithfully.

Conversely, a locked-off shot of someone talking against a plain wall looks essentially identical at 1080p and 1080p high. Spend the bitrate where the picture is busy.

A four-point check before you export

1. Watch it once, all the way through, without touching anything. Every export you regret is one you did not watch first.
2. Check the last frame. Stray black frames and half-second tails at the end of a timeline are the most common export defect there is.
3. Check the audio on a speaker, not headphones. See the mixing guide for why.
4. Check text against the safe area for wherever you are posting — the rules are in the text guide.

Then pick the preset, and let the hardware encoder do its job.

Frequently asked questions