By Barry Clegg
Ever been watching the Red Sox / Yankees game and say to yourself: “Is it just me, or has CC Sabathia gained even MORE weight?” Most likely, you are at a friend’s house that has a brand new 1080p flat screen watching 4×3 Standard Definition and the image is stretched. Now, if you’re like me, this drives you more insane than the revolving personnel at the Red Sox shortstop position.
It can be extremely confusing to some when it comes to aspect ratios and video, but I am here to help. In music, different time signatures can confuse even a seasoned player, but at the end of the day you can break down any time signature into either a 3 or a 4. But this is a discussion for another day. Today, we are talking about images not sound, and we can break it down into either a rectangle or a square.
In the world of video you have 4×3, which is a square:
4x3 square
or, 16×9, which is a rectangle:
16x9 rectangle
Pretty easy, right? There is one more aspect ratio that is common for most people, but we’ll get to that later. Let’s just get any more confusion about these two out of the way. The confusions arise when you have a video of one and a playback device of another. The one you hear most is letterbox, or fitting a rectangle into a square.
After putting in all of that hard work getting your virtual event off the ground, you face the hard truth that you need to get more people in front of your amazing content. There are a lot of traditional ways to acquire audience. You could send out mailers (expensive!). You could buy email lists (spam!). You could put a flier on some telephone poles (tedious!). Or, you could take advantage of a massive amount of personal referral power! Easy wins, right?
Facebook events are quick to set up, come with a bunch of options for configuration and are FREE. Mari Smith has an excellent post about effectively using facebook to promote your events that every event-based marketer should check out.