Less is More, at least with regards to resolution

I was working this weekend with a colleague to deploy a video for a customer, and an interesting problem arose.  The person who did the screen cast (a third person) had done it at a resolution of 1280x1024.  My colleague was complaining that the video was fuzzy on his laptop, which has a 1440x900 resolution.

The problem, of course, is that the video was captured at a higher vertical resolution, and so the video gets scaled down to fit the laptop.  While normal "real world" video looks OK when scaled, screen casts look really bad when they are close to but not 100% resolution.  (They look bad when they are a lot less than 100% resolution, but then your expectations are that the screen is shrunk).

Figuring out the right resolution is a tough one, as you need to know the audience's capabilities.  Traditionally, people have adopted 1024x768 as a sort of lingua franca of resolution, probably because the LCD projector population seems (or maybe seemed) stuck there.  But that is a terribly limiting resolution, something that almost nobody has had as their primary display for 10 years now.

Personally, I default to 720p, which is 1280x720.  It's short in the vertical dimension, but it is an official resolution supported by YouTube (which is a popular destination for videos).  It can be viewed on almost any modern computer (the square 1280x1024, or the typical laptop widescreen).  But it is still limiting.

All in all, a lot of trade-offs in choosing the resolution. But the less you can get away with, the more people you'll make happy!