PTE screen settings vs. monitor size

[davegee]

Tony,

Something to consider for the future:

A 3:2 aspect ratio image will fit to the height of a 1920x1080 output projector wheras it will only fit to the width of a 1400x1050 leaving you with black bands top and bottom.

The difference in image sizes then becomes 1620x1080 as opposed to 1400x933.333333 (a physical impossibility).

The difference in image quality is immediately obvious and the 16:9 aspect ratio has the advantage even if you don't use the full width - black bands at the sides are far less obtrusive than black bands top and bottom.

DaveG

[sanewcomb]

The essence of my question is - Those of you who are using larger monitors, how are you dealing with the situation?

LumenLux,

Your original concern if I understood it correctly was preventing the EXE file size from getting "too big". The most effective way to address this in my opinion is to use a JPEG compression value that is reasonable. Not too low or high. I find the settings in Photoshop to be too conservative and not reflective of the visual changes in the images. If I plan to distribute a show to a wide audience, one of the final steps is batch recompressing the single frame shots (not the stitched together panoramas) to a JPEG value of around 70 in Irfanview graphics program. This results in good compression and retains good visual quality. I'll watch the show one more time and if there are any photos with bothersome JPEG artifacts, I'll recompress the originals of those with a higher quality value. Large panoramas are more difficult to deal with on several fronts and are recompressed as well as resized individually with care. The more common difficulty with panos on high res screens is keeping smooth PZR motions throughout the slide and in both transitions (in and out).

One thing to remember is as the screen res goes up, the actual pixel size goes down (for the same size monitor), and the JPEG artifacts start to "blend" into one another and are not as visible while watching a show. At least that is my experience.

Steve Newcomb

Tucson, AZ USA

P.S. As others have stated, it's best to design and scale the images close to the target screen size (often your own monitor) because the resizing software in dedicated photo programs is better (and more time consuming) at doing this than PTE's runtime engine, which is designed to be small and quick. I also like aiming for a screen res one higher (if target is 1024x768 then my images are 1280x1024) to allow for slight zooms and panning.