Exporting and sharing Story Videos

Once your scenes finish rendering on the Video tab, you have an MP4 ready to download or share. This article covers what you get and how to share it. The video stays fully editable even after it's exported or published — there's no locked or read-only state.

How rendering works

When you kick off a render, the AI generates a motion clip for each scene in your storyboard. Once all clips are ready, they're automatically stitched together into a single MP4 — one file, ready to post.

Aspect ratios

Pick the aspect ratio when you set up the video. It controls how scenes are framed, and the aspect ratio your Storyboard tab frames render in:

• 9:16 vertical — for Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, TikTok. Default for most short-form social use.
• 1:1 square — for Instagram feed posts, where a square plays cleanly in-grid.
• 16:9 landscape — for YouTube uploads, embedded video on a website, or longer-form storytelling.

The aspect ratio is fixed once you start rendering. Switching ratios afterward would mean re-cropping and regenerating already-rendered scenes and any storyboard frames, so pick the ratio you want early.

Resolution: 720p and 1080p HD

On web: every Story Video renders at 720p — there's no resolution picker at creation time. 720p is sharp enough for every major social platform on mobile and desktop, and free to download. When you open Publish, you can optionally upscale to 1080p HD:

• 720p — free. The standard render.
• 1080p HD — a paid AI upscale, applied at Publish time rather than chosen when the scene renders. Each scene's clip is upscaled to 1080p individually, then the video is re-stitched at 1080p. Because it's rebuilt (not just stretched), captions and on-screen text are re-rendered crisply at the higher resolution.

The 1080p version is cached per scene: if you later re-render or edit a single scene, only that one scene is re-upscaled the next time you choose 1080p — you're not re-charged for the whole video. See Story Video credits and costs for the exact rate.

On iOS: the app still shows a resolution picker, but 1080p is clamped to 720p on the server until iOS gets its own upscale support in a future release — choosing 1080p there changes nothing today.

Captions

Captions are burned into the MP4 — they're rendered as part of each frame, not delivered as a separate file. This means:

• Captions show on every player, on every platform, with no extra setup.
• Captions cannot be turned off after render. If you need a no-caption version, clear the caption text and render again — see Captions for how caption editing works.

Caption styling (font, position, background) matches what's shown in the Video tab's preview.

Downloading and publishing

Export, download, and publish are all handled through one Publish modal — click Publish on the Video tab to open it. Pick your quality (720p or 1080p HD), then either:

• Download — saves the MP4 to your device. The file is delivered directly from Cloudflare R2 via a public URL — no sign-in required, no expiring links.
• Publish Online — puts the video on a permanent public page at /v/[slug] and gives you a share link to copy.

Both run in the background: the modal closes and a progress indicator in the top-right tracks the work. For 1080p you'll see it step through each scene's upscale and then the final re-stitch — you can keep working while it finishes.

You can also ask Sidekick to publish or export for you — it opens this same Publish modal with your requested options pre-selected, and stops there. It never publishes anything without you confirming in the modal yourself.

Sharing the public page

Every published video gets a permanent public page at /v/[slug]. Anyone with the link can watch it in their browser, no account needed. When a 1080p version is ready, the public page serves the 1080p file.

A few things to know:

• The slug is generated on first publish and never changes, even if you edit the video title later or unpublish and republish. Your shared links stay working.
• Unpublishing hides the public page but keeps the slug reserved. Republishing brings the same URL back.
• Deleting the video removes the file and the public page permanently. Anyone who saved the link will see a 404. See deleting a video, comic, series, or issue for where the delete button is and what else goes with it.

Updated on: 17/08/2026