From the course: Producing Screencast Videos on a PC

Choosing the right screen resolution for screencasts

From the course: Producing Screencast Videos on a PC

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

Choosing the right screen resolution for screencasts

“

- Computers and video often have slightly different settings. In the world of traditional video, it's most common to deliver video in a 16 by nine aspect ratio. This is often referred to as cinematic and its quickly become the standard. It's what you'll see when you go to YouTube or Vimeo or most other video sharing sites. Now, over time other formats have evolved such as square video and vertical video in social media platforms. But traditionally speaking video is usually 16 by nine. However, not all computer displays use this, your laptop may be using a 16 by 10 aspect ratio or you may find that other settings are in use depending upon your monitor. Besides the aspect ratio we also have to pay attention to the total resolution. This is the pixel count, if we record too few pixels the video's going to get blown up and look soft. And if we record too many pixels it just leads to excess file size that might he needed. So, how do we check this? Start by right clicking on your desktop and go to display settings. What you're going to want to look at is the general options here. You'll see for example, that I'm currently recording in UHD, that's fine for the display resolution in that 16 by nine. And I'm using a scale of 200%. Effectively this is doubling the size of all of the user interface elements. So while it is technically a 4K signal, because of the doubling everything works like an HD video signal, 1920 by 1080. This is often what's referred to as a high DPI display, and it's very common on modern computers. Additionally, you'll see from this pop-up list you can go to a traditional 1920 by 1080. Doing so will reconfigure your computer and adjust the scale. I'm going to stick with the recommended option here but keep this at 200%. You'll notice that 250 is recommended but that may not be ideal there, that's going to make the text a bit larger. Now, I'll switch to this for just a moment so you can see the change. You'll notice that elements have been redrawn a little bit and the text is effectively larger. If this works as you are going through and working with your different applications that you want to screencast, that's fine. But this is one of those areas that you may need to adjust if you find that elements on the screen are being cut off, because you can't see them. Well, that's because the user interface is being drawn at a larger size, so this font scaling may need to be adjusted. Generally speaking somewhere between 200 and 250% is ideal when you are working with a high DPI setting and if you are using traditional HD 1920 by 1080 then you'll go between 100 and 150. All right, this looks fine here, I see that we've got this running correctly, everything looks good for the overall resolution so I'll close this. If you have any other apps that are currently running you may need to quit and relaunch them. Let's watch PowerPoint. What I'm checking is that everything is still readable. So for example here as I open up that presentation I see that all of my major elements are fitting up here in my toolbar. Nothing appears to be cutoff, so this is a good resolution. I'm able to see the entire file, view my presentation easily, see all of the user interface commands and controls up here and nothing is cut off. In this case, I feel like I've gotten the aspect ratio, the resolution and the scaling method correct. If things were difficult to see, however, you can go in and adjust that scaling so that your user interface elements were not cut off. Remember with screencasting, it's the balance between being able to see enough things and not making the text or user interface elements so small that people watching your video have a difficult time following along.

Contents