How to make full-screen video in Android 10 with Resolve 14?

Question

I'm relatively new to both Resolve 14 and Android 10.

I have a video on my computer and I wish to edit it in Resolve 14 so that it shows full-screen on my Android 10 phone using the Google Photos app.

The video on my computer is 1280 x 720. I wish to view it full-screen on my Android 10 phone. I have gone into Resolve 14 project settings and set the project resolution to 720 x 1280. I have also cropped the video. The video in the preview looks the right shape but on my Android phone it's really small when viewed in Google Photos app.

How can I edit the video in Resolve 14 so it plays back full-screen in Android 10 using Google Photos app?

Answer 1

You have to know the aspect ratio of your phone's screen. It might be for example called "18:9" which boils down to 2:1 and you have to define if you want to view it in panorama (upright/vertical) or landscape (horizontal). Basically you look up your phone's display resolution and just divide the horizontal value by the vertical value.

Your source video is 16:9 (1.777:1), which means, in terms of the upper example, that you will have to crop it somehow to get it full-screen on your phone. But first of all you have to set up your project to match somehow your desired aspect ratio. In terms of quality the best way would be to go not only for the aspect ratio of your phone screen but as well for the native resolution which could be 2880x1440 for our example.

So one way would be, to set your timeline resolution to 2880x1440 and throw in your clip, scale (and crop) it, and export it in timeline resolution out of resolve. The drawback for this is that your computer would have to handle this high resolution while its not really necessary because your clip is much smaller.

To avoid this you could just go for the correct aspect ratio and stay resolution-wise close to your source footage. In this case, the scaling would be handled by your phone hardware when you go to full-screen mode while you keep your file small and bandwidth usage low. You could for example set your timeline-resolution to 1280x640, this crops your source and gives it a 2:1 aspect ratio. If you watch this on your phone it should use the whole display when playing it full-screen.