How to prepare your Artwork

Tips for minting your artwork successfully

Jonathan Perkins avatar
Written by Jonathan Perkins
Updated over a week ago

Your artwork and metadata will be stored on IPFS and associated with a provably unique token on the Ethereum blockchain. You will need some ETH in your wallet in order to mint a token.

  • File size limit for artwork: 250MB

  • Current supported filetypes: PNG, JPEG, GIF, MP4, GLB

💥 For MP4 files, use the H.264 or X.264 codec (not H.265, HVEC, MPEG-4, or WEBM)

💥 You should double check that your artwork displays properly in common browsers before tokenizing. You can do this by opening the video file locally in your browsers first. Checking compatibility with various browsers before tokenizing is a good step to include– as this is the most common issue artists encounter. And requires burning and re-minting the token in order to correct.

When tokenizing an MP4 or GLB file, a thumbnail file is also required. Thumbnails can be PNG, JPEG, or GIF, and up to 10MB. This file may also be lightly compressed for display across the SuperRare site. Which may have minor impacts to color and will be cropped to square.

The artwork shown on the artwork's main page will always be the full version of your original artwork– not the thumbnail.

Some tips on encoding

  • Handbrake is a great free video encoder you can use to prepare your video file for tokenization.

  • If your upload is too large. Focus on getting your file size correct first by adjusting the kbps (kilobits per second). After you get that under 250MB, then focus on adjusting the pixel dimensions of your video until it is a satisfactory quality.

💥 While there is no maximum resolution for MP4, keep in mind that a user's hardware limitations may prevent playback of very high resolution MP4 video files. For example, many iOS devices do not support MP4 video of 2500px or larger in either direction.

  • For best viewer experience, we recommend still images around 3000px and video files around 2000px

Remember, you won't be able to make changes to your artwork or the metadata info like title or description once it is tokenized. If you misspell the title or leave key information out of the description the only way to fix it is to burn the token and mint it again. If you ever do need to burn an artwork follow these steps– the artwork will be removed within 5-10 minutes once the transaction completes. Once it is removed you can mint the work again.

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