We’re in the home stretch, and today’s tip is extremely practical and easy to implement. It may take a little bit of digging to get the information you need, but the next way you can improve your church media right now is:
Know & work your resolution.
Diving into projector resolution and aspect ratios can be a maddening experience depending on what you’re trying to accomplish. Chances are pretty good, however, that if you’re dealing with a fuzzy image or the dreaded black bars on the sides or top of your image, you’re not designing to your projector’s resolution. A problem that’s easily remedied.
Resolution refers to the pixel density of your projected image, width by height. The good news is that the overwhelming majority of projectors installed in schools and churches are XGA resolution, or 1024 x 768, and have a 4:3 aspect ratio. I say good news, because if you create graphics at that resolution you’ve got a fair chance of being okay. Now, your projector may be XGA, but also have multiple modes (XGA+, WXGA, etc) that allow you to change the resolution and the aspect ratio to widescreen format.
This is important because if my projector is shooting an image that’s 1024 x 768, and I create a graphic that same resolution, then I’m in control of exactly what people see, pixel for pixel. If I’m off — let’s say my image is 800 x 600 (SVGA) — then the projector gets to control what people see because it’s going to make some decisions about how to best scale that image to fill the space. Some projectors may handle this better than others, but all will have some level of distortion or artifacting.
The same is true of images that are designed too large for their space. If my projector is XGA and I send an image that is 1280 x 1024, the projector will scale that image down. Now, this is less noticeable than scaling up, but scaling down may cause you to loose certain details as the projector anti-aliases the image to compensate for the additional data it was given.
Designing for the wrong resolution can also lead to other scaling problems, such as the appearance of either horizontal or vertical black bars. Some projectors and/or software will maintain the aspect ratio of the image with these bars rather than stretching the image to fill the space. More often than not you’ll see this on widescreen projectors/TVs rather than typical XGA projectors.
Now, if your church is using a widescreen format projector, or off the shelf HDTVs, then this issue becomes slightly more complicated. You’ll need to discover what kind of widescreen or HD image you’re talking about. On the projector side of things, widescreen can mean anything from WXGA (15:9 aspect ratio) to WUXGA (16:10). Most HDTVs, however, will be 16:9 aspect ratio, but the resolution can be 720p, 1080p, or 1080i. You’ll want to find out exactly what you’re working with.
The bottom line, regardless of equipment, is that you need to figure out your projector’s exact resolution, create your graphics to meet that spec, and make sure that your software is sending out the same resolution as well. If you’re designing to that exact size, your images will be more crisp and clean, and easier on the eyes of your church peeps.
Tomorrow we’ll hear the conclusion of the matter — part 10 of our series. Make sure to grab the RSS feed and follow me on Facebook or Twitter for the latest.
