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 480p (640×480) for motion backgrounds . Choosing these sizes for 4:3 aspect screens ensures there is no stretching of the video on the screen and it will fill the screen as expected. This motion backgrounds screen size is available in MOV h.264 & WMV 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. If you are using motion backgrounds you should use 1080p (1920×1080) or 720p (1280×720) motion clips. Using these sizes will eliminate any image stretching or distortion. This motion background screen size is available in MOV h.264 and WMV formats.

HD Motion Backgrounds are large video files and should only use MOV h.264 encoding or WMV advanced encoding to preserve video quality in playback. 

Get more information on choosing backgrounds here.

Motion Background Sizes
There are two common sizes used for motion loops. These sizes have become the unwritten standard in the worship community.

Widescreen 720p
This is a newer size used in Church projection today. The format is for wider 16:9 projection screens and allows for more horizontal real-estate. This is also the HD format for mini movie clip playback as well. The resolution is 1280×720. A common encoding is MOV format to maintain resolution. However, the new features in WMV allow for 2-pass VBR to deliver high quality Windows native encoding.

Standard 480p
Still popular in Churches around the world and for more years to come. This size is more of a square design 4:3 aspect ratio. The motion video resolution is 640×480. Common encoding for this format is MOV and WMV.

Formats
MOV is native to Mac OS X and H.264 encoding. You can use K-Lite codec for MOV use on Windows operating systems. Used in ProPresenter natively. EasyWorship and MediaShout with K-Lite Codec.
Installation tutorial on installing K-lite codec here.

WMV is native to Windows and with 2-Pass VBR maintains high quality HD video. Used in EasyWorship and MediaShout.

MPEG-1 is an older interoperable encoding but lacks quality and is slowly phasing out.