After a long discussion with the AV supplier, it became apparent that he thought there might be no way to anticipate how much of the animation would be cropped out when displayed on the final monitor.
Normally, DVD content that will be displayed on a variety of formats and aspect ratios (TV, Films, Commercials) has a standard 'safe areas'. The contect inside the bounds of these 2 safe areas should be able to be displayed by any professional monitor and DVD playback system.
The AV supplier advised me that some monitors can lose as much as 25% of the screen area and only guarantee to show the inner 'title safe' (see the example attached).
He suggested that our animation should work on that assumption.
This obviously has a huge bearing on how our cameras are framed, and layouts & type are set up. We were working under the assumption that we'd be OK having type and captions near (on close to) the outer 'action safe' areas (outer box).
Anyway, I hope to hear back from him, with any more information about how the monitor he has source performs.
Until/if that happens, I plan to revise our content for this 'worst case' scenario.
In the future, it is critical that we devise a means of ensuring that commissioned video content gets displayed at maximum quality, and with equipment that the supplier is familiar or has access to for testing.
In short, we need to have ordered this machine a few months ago, and got them to test some sample content - then used that as the guide to how much actual space we have to design to.
Otherwise, you have the potential to get get poor results - take a look at many museum video installations that confirm, this :-)
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