For a recent project, we were charged with producing a video that was going to be displayed on a plasma screen at a tradeshow booth and later in the company’s lobby. We knew we needed to produce the video presentation for 16:9, but we had many rounds of debate over which pixel aspect ratio to use and what our final delivery format needed to be. In order to find the answer we needed to take a step back and discuss what the difference is between a square and rectangular pixel in the first place.

Aspect ratio specifies the ratio of the width of a picture or pixel to its height. Photographic pixels are square with a pixel ratio of 1:1 which means that the width and height are equal, or square. NTSC TV uses a pixel aspect ratio of 0.9:1, which means that the height of each pixel is greater than the width, or rectangular. Widescreen TV (16:9) uses a pixel aspect ratio of 1.2:1, indicating the width is greater than its height, also rectangular. Luckily, HDTV at vertical resolutions of 720 and 1080 has an aspect ratio of 16:9 and uses square pixels, as standardized by the ATSC, so we chose a square pixel format for our project. Unfortunately, the challenges of delivering to an unknown monitor didn’t end there.

Plasma screens are made to display 16:9 formatted presentations but can also display 4:3. If you do decide to go with a 4:3 format you need to be aware that the viewer may not see a true 4:3 image. While there is usually a 4:3 pillarbox format option available on plasma displays, several manufacturer’s engineers have figured out their own unique ways to display a 4:3 on a 16:9 screen. In some cases, they do this by preserving the image in the center and stretching the edges towards the sides of the screen. In our case we created our presentation at 16:9 to allow the presentation to fill the screen. But the quest for the best display of a production didn’t end there, either.

Take a closer look at Plasma display resolutions and you’ll see that all screens are not created equal. Examining 7 plasma manufactures and their screens, we discovered that very few have a display of 1920 x 1080. In fact, of the 16 models we reviewed, only 4 had a native 1920×1080 display. This means that you really need to find out which model and manufacturer your client is using before you start production. If you don’t know, you might want to create your video to allow for the best presentation on the majority of plasma displays. We try to follow the rule of always working in the best quality (1080) and scaling down when necessary to meet the demands of the presentation, of course it’s always better if you can avoid resizing.

One last thought to consider is how to actually get your well produced production to the plasma display. One way would be to have the plasma connected to a hard drive where you can call up your presentation – in native HD, if possible. Another option would be to author a Blu-Ray disk, but this only works if your client has or plans to rent a Blu-Ray player. Finally, you could always author to DVD ,which is the path we had to take for this project since the client was on the east coast and they weren’t able to provide us enough details about their display setup. We exported our final comp as 16:9 with square pixels and brought it into our DVD authoring tool. From there we exported using DVD standards for a widescreen output. Did we get the greatest quality output? Maybe not the best possible, but by using the right settings throughout our post production workflow we produced the best possible DVD and it was certainly the most appropriate output for this project.

What’s your experience in working with Plasma screens? Leave a comment here with some of your thoughts and experiences on the subject.