Let Our Viewers Know About Your Organization Or Event.
The following guidelines are to help you get your information on our video calendar. Television screens are wider than tall. Flyers and press releases are often the opposite – tall and narrow, like a piece of paper. They will not be readable on TV. They also have lots of information – way more than a viewer can read in the 20 seconds it’s on the screen. Less is more – imagine trying to read lots of tiny words!
To submit your own calendar page make a 640 x 480 pixel.png file (a 4 to 3 ratio). Below are some suggestions on how to make it TV friendly. Attach the file to an email and send it to community.calendar@communitytv.org and we’ll take care of the rest! Please submit slides at least 2 weeks before the event. We cannot guarantee that slides submitted less than 2 weeks ahead will be shown on our channels, thanks.
Whites and Color choices:
Pure white backgrounds are NOT good for television transmission. In PowerPoint’s menu, you can change the slide’s brightness from 100 down to 90 and have a positive impact on how television equipment handles the brightness of your slides. To adjust a slide’s brightness in PowerPoint go to:Format > Slide Color Scheme > Custom > Change Color > Color Sliders > Grey Scale Slider and change the Brightness down from 100% to 90%. Different versions of PowerPoint may hide this tool in different menus but Help or Search can help you find this valuable feature.Instead of pure white or muted white, try light pastels or soft textured backgrounds. When choosing either background or font colors, avoid the color RED whenever possible, as it tends to smear and look bad. Blue is a very video friendly color.
Font Selection and Size:
Use BOLD and larger sans serif fonts whenever possible. Font sizes must be at 16-point or higher to guarantee legibility. Serif fonts, like Times New Roman, have little feet on the bottom of letters, which make them harder to read on television. Helvetica, Verdana, Arial Black or Arial Bold are very good sans serif fonts and work quite well. View your pages from a distance of about five to ten feet away from your computer, just as if you’re watching TV at home. If you can’t read it from that distance, probably no one else will be able to either.
Safe Border area:
There is a certain amount of the document on your computer screen that will not show when converted to television. If you can imagine a SAFE area of 5-10% from the edge (about one to one and a half inches around a typical monitor screen) and leave it empty, you probably won’t lose any of your text or images. NOTE: Landscape mode always looks better on TV monitors.
