Common questions around the right motion format or size to use with your worship presentation software come my way weekly. My hope is this brief explanation will help you make the right choices when selecting your motion backgrounds to use.

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.