What is a good document size for a Flash presentation on a widescreen TV?

Question

I am creating a presentation in Flash, which will be displayed on a 42" or a 50" TV at a booth at a trade show, fed by a laptop. What are the best document dimensions to work with? Thanks.

Answer 1

The best you can do is to find the native resolution of the TV (I'm hoping it is some kind of LCD screen) and take that as a resolution. That way you have the least problems with resizing turning out ugly. This is of course also hoping the laptop is able to connect to the screen at that resolution, but usually that isn't a big problem.

Hope this helps!

Answer 2

If you don't know ahead of time what model of TV you'll connect to, the best advice is to use the standard 720p resolution of 1280x720 or 1080i resolution of 1920x1080.

Answer 3

Common resolutions for those displays are any of your standard widescreen resolutions from 1366 x 768 to 1920 x 1080, or in some cases 1920 x 1200. I'm willing to bet that if your display is a consumer product it's native resolution will be pretty close to 1366 x 768.

Answer 4

Use vector graphics; Flash supports that. A vector-based presentation will resize natively and auto-scale to the TV/display's native resolution without any issues.

It's a really good practice to make stuff for trade shows using vector graphics anyways:

• They look very beautiful when you let the hardware deal with the graphics.
• They will look good on any display, not just the one for the show. This is useful for marketing, as they can then use this presentation at other times: demoing for customers at meetings, showing stuff on their laptop, using the presentation on a projector, etc.
• Your'e not locked into a specific monitor / screen resolution for your app. At the last minute, a large hippopotamus may rampage into the trade show hall and decide that your 42" TV is a whoopie cushion. Or, less likely, someone accidentally spills their coffee into the DVI port an hour before the show starts. With a vector graphics presentation, this is easily resolved.

These issues came back to bite our team in prepping our system for use at a tradeshow. Marketing will love you, and ultimately sell more units, if you use vector graphics.

Answer 5

As others have said, your first step is to find out the different possible resolutions on the laptop video card/TV. These will determine the dimensions of your Flash movie. However a more important consideration is -- will people be able to see/read the information you are displaying on the screen?

One way to do this before you actually get access to the screen is to find out the actual size (in inches, not pixels) of the display. Then print out mockups of your visuals (especially ones with small text) in that exact size and tape it to the wall and look at it. Is it too big? Too small? You may have to change the design.

Before the actual trade show you would really be advised to actually get your hands on the display hardware itself and test out the Flash. This is especially advisable if it's an interactive (touchscreen) piece, for example. Your best bet is to test on the target platform.