From the course: Producing Screencast Videos on a Mac

Choosing the right screen resolution for screencasts

From the course: Producing Screencast Videos on a Mac

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Choosing the right screen resolution for screencasts

- Traditional video has both a standard size and a standard shape. And while there are a few flavors available, most video these days is 16 by nine. The problem is that many computer screens are not. If you don't pay attention to this, it leads to some unwanted problems. For example, when you are sending things out to a projector or to a video sharing site like YouTube or Vimeo, you can end up with unwanted black bars. These can appear on the tops or the bottoms depending upon how you captured. This is not ideal because it leaves unwanted areas of black pixels that don't really provide for a full screen immersive experience. Additionally, you may have the settings incorrectly configured for your monitor which renders the text very difficult to read. So what's essential here is that you get your computer display to match the video resolution you're trying to record. Most time that's going to be 1080 P video or what we call high definition. Occasionally, you might be doing the lower quality, 720P that's 1280 by 720 pixels versus the 1920 by 1080 pixels. But more and more people are exploring the use of 4K or ultra high definition video which is basically double HD. So it's going to be 3,840 pixels across by 2,160 pixels tall. All right, how do you control all of this? Well, it's surprisingly tricky on a Mac and I need you to pay close attention. When you go to your system preferences, you're going to see a couple of things to play. First up, you'll go to the display section. And in this case, I've got two things connected. My built-in display and we're running things to a secondary display, the computer display and it's running through some hardware called a decimeter. If you have multiple monitors hooked up or a projector, you'll see two windows like you do here. Normally, it might be optimized for something here like the built-in retina display. The problem with that is that's 16 by 10 video. So we're going to definitely get black bars in our recording. I'll show you that in a moment. We also can deal with other options here whether or not for example there's under scan which tightens up the video and you see shrinks the screen. So it's inset a little bit for a margin. This can be useful if it's getting cut off at the edges or it appears difficult to read. Now, looking at all of this, it's fine but what we have to pay attention to is the scaled option. Mac doesn't really give you specific pixel count rather it uses relative information like smaller and larger which if you're technically oriented will probably drive you as nuts as it drives me. Here, you'll see things like different sizes so the standard one is, looks like 3008 pixels by 1692 which was no video resolution for any file on the planet ever. As we mouse through these, we can see different choices. For example, these are kind of useful and this one on the far right is a UHD resolution. If I switched to that, what you'll notice is that the texts got really hard to read. It's great that we have a 4K monitor but for people trying to follow along on YouTube or a PowerPoint presentation, they can no longer read things. So I might go to the larger text option which says that it's closer to 1920 by 1080. And if I mouse over, it tells me what that looks like, giving me a suggestion. However, this isn't that useful. I suggest you install one of the many third party resolution managers. There's a lot out there. I use one called SwitchResX. This gives me precise control. You'll notice that I can go under the specific setting and look at the available resolutions. Now, not only could I pick something like 1920 by 1080 but I could assign the 30 hertz frame rate. And I could see that it's high DPI display at a 16 by nine aspect ratio. This is great because it means that the software tool is going to still capture in 4K but that everything has been doubled or scaled because of high DPI. This makes the text larger and easier to read even though it really is a 4K image. Additionally, if you didn't have a 16 by nine monitor such as on a laptop, it could force your laptop into using a true 16 by nine video aspect ratio. This way, the files you record for things like Vimeo or YouTube are correctly sized and they're ready to drop into a PowerPoint presentation or to a typical data projector or for showing on a television set. This sort of tool makes it really easy to be ultra specific. And you'll see that it even supports advanced options like NTSC and Pal for different types of standards used by professional video around the world. I recommend tools like this and there are several others on the market. This is going to give you much more precise control over how things work. The key is make sure your in control and positively every single time, before you start a new record session, double check that your monitor settings are correct. Nothing is more frustrating than doing a bunch of recording and discovering that the video is going to be cut off or squished or that it's not the right resolution because this basically makes all of your hard work worthless.

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