I just shot some video of a presenter demonstrating several software add-ins for an accounting software package. The video was shot in widescreen SD (basically 853x480 resolution) and the software screen capture is 1024x768.

The video will basically consist of an intro, then switch to the full screen capture. Then back and forth a couple times between the two, finally ending with a closing from the presenter.

Reducing the screen capture to 853x480 results in too much loss of detail. I can increase the resolution of the video to match the screen capture, but it ends up looking soft and out of focus.

How would you render these for web delivery? Flash video? Windows media? Other?

Chris,

I sorry no one was able to provide some information. This is something I need to know about as well.

Any takers?

I ended up living with the soft look of upconverting the SD footage to HD. We created wmv files at 1020x732/15fps. Since these videos will be available only on the web, and played in Windows Media Player, that was not a big deal.

I found we were able to reduce the resolution to 800x576 and still have very readable screen captures. This also reduced the resulting file size by 30%.

In the future I will make sure to shoot the presenter in HD.