Flash playback on 42" TV?

[run23]

Hey everyone,

long time reader, not much of a poster. AS2 forum has gotten me out of a few jams in the past and the resources are greatly appreciated.

i need to create a flash file that will be played back on a 42" widescreen TV at a tradeshow. i'm wondering what dimensions i should be using to accomplish this? i'd like to letter box the animation with some white space along the borders. my thought process has been:
16:9 ratio at 42" puts the width at around 3024 pixels (!!!) if i shrink this a bit to allow for the gutters, the math showed 2500/1412.

the animation has a lot of images so the concern was the quality of playback on a TV. needless to say, this would be an enormous file, but since it's going to be played locally off a machine, K size is not as large of an issue at this point.

i feel like i'm missing something here. any help would be greatly appreciated!

~run23

[Noct]

IMHO, you would need more info if you wanted this thing perfectly sized for this particular tv.

The resolution this tv will run in is far more important then the viewable size of it's screen. Is this thing running off a pc? Is it in HD? Exactly what resolution is it running at? I'm guessing with a tv like that at a trade show, it is probably hooked up to a standard PC video card output, via HDMI, or DVI. Which means, it is probably running in a HDTV mode from the graphics adaptor. (If it is not, they are simply running a rca/svideo line out of a graphics adator, in which case the resolution of the image is 480i)

Typically, HDTV modes coming from a pc source are at different resolutions then thier normal tv standards.
For instance, my HDTV if connected to my pc @1280X720 (720p) cuts off edges of the screen. I have to drop it to like 1160X630 or something to get it to fit properly against pc aspect ratio and overscan.)

Also, something to think about. If this is a vector based Flash file, you can pretty much scale it to any size you want and you should lose nothing in the translation.
(Apart from fonts, but those can be embedded or converted to shapes)

If you have raster graphics in there, you will need source files for those at the correct size, or they are going to be very pixelated.

True HDTV resolution is generally between 1280X720 and 1280X1080. It may end up being quite difficult to get your raster images at that large of a scale.

[run23]

thank you noct for the reply. my orignal contact didn't have too much information other than the fact that the animation will be run off a laptop...so rca/svideo seems the most likely. the animation is not just a vector based, which is why i've been so concerned about this. what would you suggest at this junction? thanks again!

~run23

[Noct]

Well, you are kinda up the creek without a paddle. If it is displaying through a laptop, you are probably right, they are outputting the desktop resolution of the laptop through rca cables/svideo, which downscales the resolution to tv standards (720X480i in the US/Japan).

So, you could create based on that, but it isn't going to look the same as it does on your pc because it is actually displaying a downscaled desktop that is really at 800X600, 1024x768, or 1280X1024. That kind of setup tends to make text almost impossible to read, and blurs graphics quite a bit as well.

I would create it based on a display of 1024X768 and hope for the best. You should at least be able to maintain your scaling and aspect ratio that way.
As far as your raster images go, make them to suit that resolution and you should be ok distortion-wise. It is just clarity that wil be effected, but that is out of your hands. Your main concern here is going to be text. Small fonts become a blur in these types of situations, and large text gets aliaised so bad it looks like a staircase.