Choosing Background Sizes

There are two sizes you can choose from when it comes to worship backgrounds. The sizes really are aspect ratios and not pixel dimensions. There are 4:3 and 16:9 ratios. This determines the width and hight of your projector screen and area of coverage. This also determines your worship backgrounds both motion and still. For motion backgrounds we refer to 4:3 as 480p and 16:9 as 720p.

4:3 aspect ratio

This is the original and still widely used screen dimension. With this screen you would want to choose 1024x768 backgrounds and for motion backgrounds you need 480p (640x480). Choosing these sizes for 4:3 aspect screens ensures there is no stretching on the image on the screen and it will fill the screen as expected. This motion backgrounds screen size is available in mov h.264, wmv and mpeg-1 formats.

16:9 aspect ratio

This is a very popular screen size today. With a wider screen you have more screen real estate to work with and opens the door to HD movie play back. The backgrounds you would want to choose for this screen size is 1280x720. If you are using motion backgrounds you should use 720p (1280x720) motion clips. Using these sizes will eliminate any image stretching or distortion. This motion backgrounds screen size is available in mov h.264 and wmv formats.

HD Motion Backgrounds are large video files and should only use h.264 encoding or wmv advanced encoding to preserve video quality in playback. EasyWorship and MediaShout can support mov h.264 with the addition of a codec. See k-lite codec tutorial for EasyWorship. WMV is native to Windows and requires no additional codecs for playback in MediaShout and EasyWorship. ProPresenter supports h.254 natively on Apple OS X.