Last week I didn't build a new template. I rebuilt how the three I already have are presented — and the most useful thing I found was hiding in the video player.

All three listings had a preview video in the first gallery slot, and all three looked soft. Interface text was mush. I assumed compression and was about to re-record with "better settings", which is the kind of fix that costs a day and changes nothing.

So I pulled the master playlist instead. Framer serves preview videos through Mux as adaptive HLS — you can open stream.mux.com/<id>.m3u8 and read the ladder.

All three of mine topped out at 1440×1080, at 1.4–1.9 Mbit/s. That number explained everything:

→ Mux never creates a rendition above the source. Whatever you upload is the ceiling a buyer will ever see.

→ Framer recommends 1600×1200. And 1440×1080 is exactly 1920×1080 cropped to 4:3 — which is what happens when you export 16:9 and crop afterwards. Cropping doesn't add pixels, it removes them.

→ On a Retina screen the gallery slot is 700–900 CSS px, so 1400–1800 physical. A 1440px-wide video gets stretched. That's the mush.

→ Small interface text and thin lines are the worst case for H.264 at that bitrate, and every extra encode pass makes it worse. Mine had two.

The fix wasn't better settings. It was setting the aspect ratio at recording time: shrink the browser window to 4:3, record with QuickTime (Retina gives you 2400×1800), edit on a 4:3 timeline, export once at 15–20 Mbit/s, upload that file directly. No crop step, no second encode.

You can check your own in a minute: open your listing, find the .m3u8 request, look at the top rendition. If it's below 1600×1200, that's the best your template will ever look to a buyer.

Fixing three listings moved more than a fourth template would have. Distribution was the bottleneck, not production.

Last week I didn't build a new template. I rebuilt how the three I already have are presented — and the most useful thing I found was hiding in the video player.

All three listings had a preview video in the first gallery slot, and all three looked soft. Interface text was mush. I assumed compression and was about to re-record with "better settings", which is the kind of fix that costs a day and changes nothing.

So I pulled the master playlist instead. Framer serves preview videos through Mux as adaptive HLS — you can open stream.mux.com/<id>.m3u8 and read the ladder.

All three of mine topped out at 1440×1080, at 1.4–1.9 Mbit/s. That number explained everything:

→ Mux never creates a rendition above the source. Whatever you upload is the ceiling a buyer will ever see.

→ Framer recommends 1600×1200. And 1440×1080 is exactly 1920×1080 cropped to 4:3 — which is what happens when you export 16:9 and crop afterwards. Cropping doesn't add pixels, it removes them.

→ On a Retina screen the gallery slot is 700–900 CSS px, so 1400–1800 physical. A 1440px-wide video gets stretched. That's the mush.

→ Small interface text and thin lines are the worst case for H.264 at that bitrate, and every extra encode pass makes it worse. Mine had two.

The fix wasn't better settings. It was setting the aspect ratio at recording time: shrink the browser window to 4:3, record with QuickTime (Retina gives you 2400×1800), edit on a 4:3 timeline, export once at 15–20 Mbit/s, upload that file directly. No crop step, no second encode.

You can check your own in a minute: open your listing, find the .m3u8 request, look at the top rendition. If it's below 1600×1200, that's the best your template will ever look to a buyer.

Fixing three listings moved more than a fourth template would have. Distribution was the bottleneck, not production.