Digital Signage Video Walls: Design with Size in Mind

Those big, beautiful digital signage video walls look great unless you don’t design your content to fit. How many times have you been drawn to a wall-sized display cluster only to scrunch up your nose at the stretched or squeezed images being shown on it?

When you’re prepping your images or video for super high-resolution display, you need to make sure the resolution and aspect ratio match the size of the area it will be shown on.  In the case of video walls, there are a few things to remember:

  • Don’t use low resolution images on a high resolution video wall. Your content may look great on your desktop monitor, but make sure it won’t get pixelated or fuzzy when you blow it up to the big screens.
  • Make sure the resolution and aspect ratio match the video wall. You don’t want your image to be stretched or squeezes (or show black borders) because it’s one format and your video wall is another.
  • Consider display bezels on the video wall and where they will cross your design. It’s never attractive to have a screen border going right through someone’s face or cutting off important text in your message.

Video walls and custom screen clusters often require unusual aspect ratios. You may want to do a traditional block of screens (2×2 or 3×3), but you might also have more unique set ups like three screens side-by-side. If this is the case, you’ll have to design your content for that exact resolution for it to look good.

Visix digital signage products already let you design up to 14,000×14,000 pixels, so you’re not limited by your software or hardware. However, remember these tips for using AxisTV on video walls:

  • If you use templates in AxisTV, you’ll need to design special ones that take the aspect ratio into account.
  • If you import content, you’ll need to create custom media for your video wall. For example, there’s no camera that takes videos in 64:9 for a 1×4 wall. The original video will have to be edited/cropped to take the aspect ratio into consideration.