Different sized screens

[Germini]

Hello!


I have been working on a 1080x1920 video. It's a commercial kind of thing to be shown at different stores.
The costumer has told me that they need the video to be able to show on three different types of screens:

1080x1920
1080x3840 (to screens linked together)
1920x1080

I'm not sure if it's even possible to make that happen. Do you have any advice for me?

[SameSelf]

Hmm, at first I thought you were just mixing up the typical order of aspect ratios when you said 1080x1980, but it sounds like you are talking about a 1920x1080 monitor turned 90 degrees. If your video is really a 9:16 aspect ratio, you will have to severely crop it, then upscale it, to fit a 1920x1080 monitor which 16:9. For example, if you want to upscale by a simple factor of 2, then you would need to crop the video to 960x540. This is a giant crop that discards 75% of the image. Yikes! If you prefer, you would crop just the vertical and keep the full 1080 pixels width by cropping to 1080x607. You would then scale this by a smaller 16/9 ratio. This crop "only" discards 68% of the image, but it is a little messier as the resulting image is not exactly 1920x1080. These are your edge cases, so I imagine the answer is somewhere in between the severe crop of 75% and the messier, vertical-only crop of 68%.

The other option is to downscale the 1080x1920 video to fit in the 1080 height and have black letterboxes on the left and right of the image, but those will be really fat letterboxes which probably won't look very good either. And from the sounds of it, you want to fill up all or most of the display.

There is also the option of simply stretching the video to fit after downscaling instead of letterboxing, but this probably wouldn't look good either because that would be a big stretch.

In actuality, if I was forced to do this, I would probably use a combination of all four options above to minimize the impacts of each. Crop, scale, stretch, and letterbox.

A 1080x3840 monitor would involve similar operations to fit a 9:32 aspect ratio.

It is messy, but possible. Your options are Crop, Scale, Stretch, and/or Letterbox.

[hello_hello]

I have been working on a 1080x1920 video.

1080x1920 - already the same resolution.
1080x3840 - (two screens linked together) - is it to be dual screens linked and running as a single display, or two screens with one being a duplicate/mirror of the other? If it's the latter the resolution already matches the monitors.
1920x1080 - I assume it can be a different copy of the video? If so maybe resize the 1080x1920 video to 608x1080 and add 656 pixels of black each side to make it 1920x1080.

[Germini]

Thank you so much Sameself for a long and thurough answer. I really appericiate it! Thank you too hello_hello! I'm not really sure how that 1080x3840 screen works. I'm gonna have to ask the customer. Your answers har really helped me and I think I just have to try the different alternatives to find out what works out the best. But I think maybe the best solution is to costum make a new video for the different ratio.

Again, thank you!

[SameSelf]

You're welcome, and welcome to the forum!

FWIW, it sounds like this might be a customer not understanding the difficulty of what they are asking. They are literally asking to fit a square peg into a round hole. But making a custom video at the requested resolutions will be hard too. While you can certainly reshoot the 1080x1920 video in a 1920x1080 format, I am not aware of any camera that shoots in 1080x3840 format. Even if you re-shoot the video as 4K, you will still have to crop it, although you could frame the shoot with this in mind. Just something to keep in mind when you talk to the client.

[Cornucopia]

IIWY, I would be producing with 3 different videos in mind (and charging thrice), including shooting/editing but also even storyboarding, etc. They have different "feels" and should be approached totally differently.

Scott

[Germini]

I just got an email that I have to export in 540x1920 for the 1080x3840 screen. They are going to stretch it out to fit the screen after.
Do you guys know how I'll best go about doing that? Is there something i need to think about while I'm editing a version for that screen?

[smrpix]

Is there something i need to think about while I'm editing a version for that screen?

In all cases you should be thinking about any cropping/reframing to both match the aspect ratio of the display and not lose vital visual information.