More fun with technology! If you are up to date, you have followed these posts for a while. Our Part 1 of this four-part series on resolution is very important if you plan to use the information provided here, so give it a good read.
Okay, ready?
HD / FHD / 4K / Resolution (or What’s What):
There are 2 popular display resolutions: FHD which is 1920×1080 (width x height) and 4K, which is 3,840 horizontal pixels by 2,160 vertical pixels (or swap those for Portrait Mode display). Both are displayed in widescreen (16:9) image format and use square pixels (the tiny individual “dots” of color that collectively make up the full image). In contrast, regular HD is 1280×720, using different pixel aspect ratios (non-square) to create either widescreen (16:9) or standard (4:3) images. This is old technology! Displays today are typically 4K or FHD.
Since current technology is certainly capable of keeping up with huge amounts of bandwidth, why would there be a need to compromise? Bandwidth may still an issue, however, especially in video transmitted over the Internet or through cellular service. The other issue is that many consumer or “pro-sumer” video cameras can only record high-resolution (1920×1080) video in interlaced scan format, since the hardware can’t support the higher bandwidth required by progressive. Don’t lose sleep over this – just use resources provided by your media house to guide in the right file rendering size.
As for video, MP4/H.264/AVC format is capable of producing very high quality video in virtually any common resolution, including HD and 4K. It has been almost universally adopted as the standard for streaming video. It is the preferred format for YouTube, Vimeo, and iTunes, and the H.264 codec can also be used to encode MOV files. MP4 files can be played by the QuickTime Player on any Mac or Windows computer, the Windows Media Player on all Windows 7 based systems, and by most smart phones. Most of the currently available digital signage systems are compatible, too … WooHoo!
For these reasons, we at LobbyPOP prefer to render final video as MP4 files, to ensure compatibility across the spectrum, whether it’s playing from the cloud or streaming via YouTube. Of course, when the need arises, we can render in virtually any desired format … but generally speaking, an MP4 file will work for any computer or digital signage system.
There are many further details that may be discussed in the future, such as the accompanying audio formats for video files, bitrates, encoding profiles, etc., but it is too much to cover in this installment. Hopefully this crash course will help to gain an understanding of what HD video is all about.
For more: LobbyPOP provides an excellent Guide for LobbyPOP Pros and Digital Signage Certified Experts. Just sayin…
