You may have noticed that some of the videos you upload to TikTok don’t always look great. If you think you need a DSLR, you are wrong. Blurring, pixelation, and general poor quality that you may experience in your uploaded videos are probably not your smartphone’s fault – it could be because you’re not uploading your videos in HD.
Ideally, TikTok would allow users to upload high definition videos by default, but that’s not the case. Reasons can be good, such as faster download speeds, faster download times, and data retention, but if you want your videos to look better, you should enable high-res uploads. Luckily, TikTok has a simple setting to enable HD videos on upload; only this is a somewhat hidden setting.
TikTok officially announced HD downloads for “select countries”in December 2021, but it was available for some for most of 2021. There is no official list of countries that can upload or shoot HD videos on TikTok, but it is definitely available in the US.
Prepare a video
In the TikTok app, create a new video as usual. Tap the plus sign (+) in the navigation bar, then record or upload a video. After that, add text, animation, filters, and other effects if you like, and click Next to proceed to the publishing settings.
Turn on the HD setting
In your post settings, add a title, hashtags, and tags, and adjust any privacy options you see—anything you would normally do. But before you hit the Publish button, there’s one more thing you need to do.
Click “More Options”at the bottom, then enable “Upload HD”or “Allow Upload in High Quality”, depending on which version of TikTok you’re using. This setting is disabled by default, but the toggle remains enabled after enabling it, so you won’t need to do this for future video uploads. You can then return to the post details and click “Post”to upload the video to your profile.
Watching high definition video
Depending on the length and size of the video, processing and uploading may take some time. Once the download is complete, you can go to your profile to view the newly posted HD video.
The maximum possible resolution for downloading TikTok is 1080p, so if you shoot a video in 4K resolution, it will be reduced to 1080p. However, it’s an improvement over having to turn off “Download HD”or “Allow Downloads in High Quality”and get standard quality.
Your videos should now look better than before, but there may be other obstacles (old phone, low resolution camera, lens scratches, lighting, etc.) that can affect quality as well, so keep that in mind.