How to Make Instagram Stories in Premiere Pro

Building high-quality Instagram Stories doesn’t require fumbling with your phone, you can gain professional-level control and create truly unique content right inside Adobe Premiere Pro. This guide gives you the complete workflow, from setting up your project correctly to exporting a polished, ready-to-post video that looks fantastic on a vertical screen. Forget guesswork - we're covering the exact steps you need to make your Stories stand out.

Why Bother Using Premiere Pro for Instagram Stories?

You might wonder, "Can't I just use the Instagram app?" Of course. But for brands, creators, and anyone serious about their content quality, Premiere Pro offers a level of polish and efficiency that in-app tools simply can’t match. Here’s why it’s worth the effort:

• Total Creative Control: Instead of being limited by Instagram's stickers and text styles, you can create anything you imagine. This includes smooth text animations, custom graphic overlays, complex video layering, and picture-in-picture effects.
• Consistent Branding: Build templates and save presets for your brand’s specific fonts, colors, and logos. This ensures every Story you post feels cohesive and reinforces your brand identity, something that's difficult to manage accurately within the app.
• Professional Audio Editing: Instagram's audio controls are basic. In Premiere, you have the Essential Sound panel, which lets you clean up dialogue, mix it perfectly with music, and add sound effects - creating a much more immersive experience for viewers who have their sound on.
• Efficient Workflow: If you're creating multiple stories or a whole campaign, doing it in Premiere Pro is much faster. You can edit multiple clips in one sequence, batch export, and maintain a consistent look across all of your content without starting from scratch each time.

Step 1: Get Your Premiere Pro Project Set Up for Stories

Everything starts with the right foundation. If your sequence settings are wrong, your video will look stretched, blurry, or have ugly black bars. Let's create the perfect vertical video canvas from the very beginning.

Create a Custom Vertical Sequence

Instagram Stories use a vertical 9:16 aspect ratio. Premiere Pro doesn't have a default preset for this, so you have to create your own. It's easy, and you only have to do it once.

1. Open Premiere Pro and go to File > New > Sequence.
2. In the "New Sequence" window, click on the Settings tab. Don't worry about the presets on the left.
3. Adjust the settings as follows:
   • Editing Mode: Change this to Custom. This unlocks all the other options.
   • Timebase: 29.97 frames/second is a good standard for social media, but you can also use 23.976 fps if that's what your footage was shot in.
   • Frame Size: This is the most important part. Set it to 1080 horizontal and 1920 vertical. This creates the 9:16 vertical format.
   • Pixel Aspect Ratio: Keep this at Square Pixels (1.0).
   • Fields: Set this to No Fields (Progressive Scan).
   • Audio Sample Rate: 48000 Hz is the standard and works perfectly.
4. Once you've configured these settings, click Save Preset at the bottom of the window. Name it something memorable like "Instagram Story 9:16 Vertical" and add a short description. Next time you make a Story, you can just select this preset and start editing.
5. Click "OK" to create your new vertical sequence. You’ll now see a tall, phone-shaped canvas in your Program Monitor, ready for editing.

Step 2: Start Editing Your Content

Now that your project is set up correctly, it's time to build your Story. The main rules are to keep things moving quickly and to make your visuals and message clear within the first few seconds.

Designing for the Instagram Interface

Before you add any text or graphics, you need to account for Instagram’s own interface elements. Your username and profile picture appear at the top, and the "Send message" bar and other icons are at the bottom. You don't want to place anything crucial in those areas.

Premiere Pro has a built-in guide for this. In your Program Monitor (the video preview window), click the small wrench icon and select Safe Margins. This will display boxes on your screen, helping you keep your most important elements - like captions or logos - safely within the viewable area and away from the edges where they might get covered up.

Adding Punchy Text & Graphics

Captions are a huge part of Instagram Stories, since so many people watch with the sound off. Premiere Pro's Essential Graphics panel makes adding professional-looking text a breeze.

• Go to Window > Essential Graphics to open the panel.
• Use the Type Tool (T) to write text directly on your video. In the Essential Graphics panel, you can easily change the font, size, color, add a stroke, or a background box for better readability - just like you see in many popular Stories.
• Don't be afraid to make your text big and bold. It needs to be readable on a small phone screen, often for only a few seconds.
• For animation, select your text layer in the timeline and open the Effect Controls panel. You can add simple animations by using keyframes for properties like Position, Scale, and Opacity. For example, setting two keyframes for Scale (from 0% to 100%) will make your text "pop" onto the screen. It's a simple effect that adds a lot of energy.

Sound Design that Hooks Viewers

Sound is just as important as your visuals. If your story has audio, you need to make sure its levels are clean and balanced.

Drag your chosen music track or sound effects onto the audio tracks in your timeline, underneath your video clip. To balance everything, open the Essential Sound panel (Window > Essential Sound). Select your music clip and tag it as "Music." Premiere will offer simple tools like "Auto-ducking," which automatically lowers the music volume a bit whenever dialogue is present. This little touch makes your story feel way more professional.

Step 3: Recreating Instagram's Native Look

Part of what makes creators successful on Instagram is that their Stories *feel* native to the platform, even when they're edited externally. You can pre-build certain Instagram-style elements in Premiere Pro to maintain a powerful, branded aesthetic without relying on the app's limited stickers.

Creating Motion Graphic Templates (.MOGRTs)

Let's say you always use the same animated title card or a lower-third with your website on it. Instead of remaking it every time, you can build it once in the Essential Graphics panel and export it as a Motion Graphics Template (.MOGRT). To do this, create your desired graphic and animations, then right-click on the graphic layer in your timeline and select Export as Motion Graphics Template.

Save it to your local library. Now, whenever you're making a new story, you can just drag and drop your custom branded element from the Essential Graphics panel's "Browse" tab straight into your timeline. This is a game-changer for content efficiency.

Making a Custom "New Post" Sticker

A very common Story type is promoting a new grid post. You can easily create a sleek, animated version of this in Premiere Pro:

1. Take a screenshot of the Instagram post you want to promote and import it into Premiere.
2. Place your "New Post" title on a layer above the screenshot. Choose a font that stands out.
3. Animate it! A simple tactic is to use the Position and Rotation keyframes in the Effect Controls panel. Start your post slightly off-screen or rotated, then have it animate into place over the first half-second. This little bit of movement is far more engaging than a static image.

Step 4: Exporting Your Masterpiece for Instagram

You’ve done all the creative work. Now it's time to export. Your export settings are critical for making sure the video looks sharp on Instagram and isn’t ruined by ugly compression.

My Go-To Export Settings for Instagram Stories

Follow these settings exactly for a reliable, high-quality result:

1. With your sequence selected, go to File > Export > Media or press Cmd + M (Mac) or Ctrl + M (Windows).
2. Format: H.264. This is the universal standard for web video.
3. Preset: Start with Match Source - High bitrate. Our custom settings below will refine this.
4. Click on the Video tab to expand the details.
   • Check that the frame size is still 1080 x 1920.
   • Under Bitrate Settings, change the Encoding to VBR, 2 pass. This takes a little longer but provides better quality for the file size.
   • Set the Target Bitrate [Mbps] to 12.
   • Set the Maximum Bitrate [Mbps] to 15.
   *A note on bitrate: It's tempting to push it higher for "better quality," but Instagram will re-compress your file anyway. Sending a file within this range gives Instagram a high-quality source to work from without making the file size so huge that its A.I. overly squishes it.
5. Check the box for Use Maximum Render Quality. This will make sure everything, especially any scaling you did, looks as sharp as possible.
6. Click Export.

Getting the File to Your Phone

Your finished .mp4 file is ready. The final step is getting it from your computer to your phone so you can post it. The easiest methods are:

• AirDrop: For Mac and iPhone users, this is the fastest way.
• Cloud Storage: Upload the file to Dropbox, Google Drive, or WeTransfer, then download it from the respective app on your phone.

Final Thoughts

Editing your Instagram Stories inside Premiere Pro moves you from a casual user to a content creator with purpose. By mastering the vertical sequence, designing with the UI in mind, and using the right export settings, you can produce slick, branded content that stops scrollers in their tracks.

Once we've gone to the trouble of crafting these professional Stories, we don't want to fumble the final step of getting them posted regularly and on time. That's exactly why we built Postbase. We needed a simple, reliable way to manage our video-first content calendar across multiple platforms. It lets us visually plan and schedule our Stories, Reels, and TikToks all at once, ensuring our lovingly edited videos go live exactly when they should, without a single glitch.