Tips for Producing Graphics for TV and Video Streaming Presentations
By Lana Johnson & Brian Gevik

TV and video streaming outputs are at a much lower resolution than that of computer monitors. Following are some guidelines to keep in mind when preparing presentations that will be viewed on TV or through video streaming to assure your information is readable by your viewers.
Layout
  1. Keep information in the center 2/3 of the slide to avoid having it cut off when projected.
  2. Follow a 4:3 aspect ratio for video broadcasting.

Text
  1. Don’t trust the PowerPoint slide master to pick the size or font of your text.
  2. Use large text sizes. Text should be large enough to read without effort. Titles and subheading text should be a minimum of 44 point. Body text should be a minimum of 32 point.
  3. Text should be bold.
  4. Use sans serif fonts like Ariel or Helvetica. Avoid fine-lined fonts like Times Roman or other serif fonts. The thin lines will not project well.
  5. Use upper and lowercase lettering.
  6. Always use a dropshadow behind the text.
  7. Use no more than 5-6 lines of text. Less text means greater legibility and a cleaner looking presentation.
Colors
  1. Make sure there is good contrast between the text and the background colors. Use dark cool colors like dark blues, darker grays, dark greens, and black for the backgrounds. Use warm colors such as yellows, light reds, and off-whites for text and graphics.
  2. Stay away from saturated or bright colors such as reds, yellows, true whites, magentas and yellow-greens as they tend to create a bleeding or halo effect when sent to the broadcast screen and can distort text or other graphics. Use medium colors instead. Medium reddish-brown will look like a red when projected to the video screen. Use a light colored yellow instead of a bright yellow.
  3. Use a 20% gray to emulate white as a true white is too hot on the screen.

 
Graphics
  1. Avoid images with lots of small detail. They will lose some of the detail due to the low resolution of the video output.
  2. Avoid using complicated transitions and animations. Keep it SIMPLE.
  3. When using shaded backgrounds, make the shading horizontal rather than diagonal for better readability of information.
  4. Avoid complicated patterns in backgrounds. Detail in a complicated pattern makes other parts of the graphic less readable.
  5. Colorful bar graphs and pie charts can work well in streaming video, but charts full of data – Excel spreadsheets, for example – almost invariably look bad once they’ve been videotaped, encoded, compressed, and streamed.

 
Videos
  1. Start with good quality video. Poor quality audio and video will sound and look worse when streamed.
  2. High-action and effect-rich video does not lend itself well to streaming presentation, especially when the viewer is using a slower machine connected at dial-up speeds.
  3. Video hates certain patterns. Fine-wale stripes and certain patterns of check and tweed in clothing will “strobe” even very high quality video imaging equipment.
  4. Saturated colors - including Husker Red - can look “smeared” under certain conditions (harsh lighting, low-quality cameras, etc.) So, whether it’s clothing, PowerPoint fonts and backgrounds, or graphics, muted colors usually look better on TV and in streamed video.
  For more information on Presentation Graphics, see http://deal.unl.edu/presentations/
 
© 2004• University of Nebraska • Communications and Information Technology • NU Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources • Lincoln, NE
Lana K. Johnson James W. King University of Nebraska