Someone asked me today what the Optimal Dimensions were for an FLV video used in the presenter panel of Articulate Presenter. I thought I would post it here, in case anyone else wanted to know. Technically, there isn’t really an optimal dimension for an FLV video since Articulate Presenter will scale anything that is too large to fit in the presenter panel…but if you wanted to know at which size it would start to scale, that size is 233 pixels wide. So anything that is larger than 233 pixels wide will be scaled down to 233 pixels, and the aspect ratio will be maintained.
Optimal Dimensions for FLV Video?
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Interesting… Way back when I was a little multimedia kid, I learned that digital video worked best when the dimensions and location of the top left corner of the video was cleanly divisible by 8 or 16.
At risk of geeking out, it was to do with Discrete Cosine Transformation – subdividing blocks of each frame down to smaller and smaller units in order to deal with the right amount of data to work with. If you didn’t obey the 8/16 rule, performance suffered because your processor was doing a lot more work than was strictly necessary. Not just at compression time, playback time was also affected.
These days I’d say Mod(8)=0 is more of a fine-tuning thing than a necessary step, but I do find my movies are happier when playing back in PPT when they obey the rule.
This is really interesting. Whoever wrote this I would be interested to talk to you more about it. If you could drop me an email (dmozealous and I work at articulate.com) I would like to discuss this with you, I just got a little confused by the left corner mus be divisible by 8. Is it the distance from the right corner that it needs to be divisble by 8?
I am not the original poster, but this might helpl. Yes, it has to do with the way that the compression codecs work, breaking the video image into blocks of 8×8 or 16×16 pixels. If the height/width is divisible by 8 or 16, this would result in quicker and cleaner compression/decompression. This will vary according to the codec that is being used. I’m not very familiar with flv codecs, so not sure if it is as much of an issue. But it certainly was a concern for MPEG and MJPEG.
That makes sense. Thanks for the post.
Does anyone know if it’s possible to resize the presenter panel so that the video is larger? I haven’t been able to find anything as of yet, but I thought someone here might know. I really only need to increase it by 60px or so, but my customer does want it increased. Thanks in advance, Danny
works with four for me
had 1920 x 1040
looks great at 480 x 260