LED Content Specs: Resolution, Loop Length, Brightness and Sound Limits

A fixed LED screen has a captive audience and a predictable viewing distance. A van has neither. The screen is moving, the viewer is often moving too, and the ambient light changes every hour of the day.

That is why content specifications written for a mall atrium screen fail on a truck. On a van, average viewer contact is a few seconds at a distance of 10 to 40 metres, sometimes through a car windscreen, sometimes across three lanes of traffic. Everything in the file has to survive that.

In our deployments the three failures that recur are always the same: text set too small because the designer worked on a laptop at full resolution, a loop so long that a viewer waiting at a signal never reaches the offer, and a film graded dark for a cinematic look that vanishes in 2 pm sun. None of these are hardware problems. They are file problems, they are cheap to fix before production and expensive to fix after the vehicle is on the road.

Vehicle Branding runs three LED formats: an 8x6 ft screen on an LED truck at ₹10,500 per day, a 10x8 ft screen at ₹12,500 and a 16x10 ft screen at ₹18,000. All three rates include wrap production for the vehicle body, RTO permit, driver, fuel and GST. Physical size drives everything downstream.

The 8x6 ft panel is a close-quarters screen that works in market lanes, outside store frontages and in residential clusters where the nearest viewer is within 20 metres. The 10x8 ft is the general-purpose road screen and the size most campaigns default to. The 16x10 ft is for arterial roads, rally grounds and event perimeters where the nearest viewer may be 40 metres away, and it is the only size on which a full product shot with a price point reliably reads at distance. Choose the screen before commissioning artwork, because a film cut for the 16x10 ft canvas and then downscaled to the 8x6 ft panel loses precisely the detail the campaign paid for.

Design at the panel's native pixel count, not at 1920x1080. Outdoor van panels across our fleet run coarse pixel pitches, so an 8x6 ft screen resolves to a few hundred pixels on the long edge and even the 16x10 ft screen sits well below HD. Ask for the exact panel resolution of the vehicle assigned to the campaign and master to it, because the media player will scale anything else and scaling is where thin type turns to mush.

Aspect ratio matters as much as pixel count. The three sizes are roughly 4:3, 5:4 and 8:5, so none of them is 16:9, and a 16:9 master gets pillarboxed or cropped, with cropping removing exactly the logos designers park in corners. Keep all text, logos and the call to action inside a safe area of about 80 per cent of the frame, centred. Our production standard sets the primary message at a minimum of one-tenth of the screen height, which on a 6 ft tall panel means roughly 7 inches of rendered text.

Loop length is the most under-thought item in a set of LED content specs, and the right answer depends on whether the van roves or parks. For a roving van in traffic, contact is short and repeated, so the loop should be short: in our deployments 45 to 60 seconds works well, built from three or four segments of 10 to 15 seconds each, so that any single signal stop delivers one complete idea. For a parked van at a mela, a rally, a society activation or a store frontage, dwell time is longer and a 90 to 120 second loop with a proper narrative segment holds up.

Beyond roughly two minutes, repeat value collapses, because no passer-by waits for the loop to come around again. Sequence so that the brand and the call to action appear inside every segment rather than only at the end. A viewer who catches 12 seconds of a 60 second loop should still know who is speaking and what is on offer.

Outdoor LED panels are bright by design, and the panels Vehicle Branding runs are specified for direct sunlight rather than indoor conditions. Brightness alone does not rescue a badly graded file. Midday sun flattens perceived contrast, so shadow detail simply disappears and anything below roughly 20 per cent luminance in the file reads as flat black on the street.

Master with a high-contrast grade, large flat colour blocks and hard separation between text and background: white or bright yellow type on a saturated brand colour survives daylight, while grey on charcoal does not. On the operations side, Vehicle Branding steps brightness down after dusk. A panel run at full daylight output at 9 pm on a residential road produces glare that traffic police and residents both object to, and it is a common reason a vehicle is asked to move on. Drivers switch to an evening profile at sunset, so if a campaign needs a specific evening look, supply a second graded version rather than expecting the panel to dim gracefully.

Sound is where LED van campaigns attract complaints. Vehicle Branding treats audio as a bounded output rather than a volume knob: vans are set so the track stays intelligible for roughly 15 to 20 metres and falls away beyond that, drivers mute near hospitals, schools, examination centres and places of worship, and amplified audio is switched off at night. Municipal and traffic police tolerances vary by zone and by city, and silence zones are absolute regardless of the hour.

Design the audio track around that reality. Assume a large share of viewers will never hear it, which means the film must work fully muted, with captions or on-screen text carrying anything the voiceover says. Keep the music bed simple, because compressed roof-mounted speakers competing with traffic lose almost everything below the mid-range. A short, distinct audio signature repeated across segments does more for recall than a dense mix, and it gives the operator something to lower without losing the message.

264 MP4 at the panel's native resolution, progressive, at a constant 25 or 30 frames per second, with stereo AAC audio. Avoid variable frame rate exports from phone editing apps, because van media players stutter on them. Send the loop as a single file in final play order rather than as loose clips with playlist instructions, unless the campaign specifically needs re-sequencing rights during the run.

Alongside the film, supply a static fallback image at the same resolution in case the player drops out, and the separate artwork for the vehicle wrap, which is printed rather than played. The Vehicle Branding handover checklist asks for five confirmations: correct native resolution, a loop within the agreed length, all text inside the 80 per cent safe area, a daylight-graded version supplied, and a signed-off check that the film reads with sound off. Files clearing all five typically go live inside the 24-hour deployment SLA we hold in tier-1 cities.

Long campaigns should plan content changes rather than improvise them. A four-week run in a retail corridor usually wants at least two versions, an awareness cut for the first fortnight and an offer-led cut for the closing week, because the same loop in front of the same commuters loses attention faster than a static wrap does. Content swaps are a remote operation on the Vehicle Branding fleet, since the file is pushed to the vehicle's media player and the van does not have to return to the yard.

Allow the production team one working day for a swap, after which the daily report shows the new version running. Where a campaign spans several cities with different offers, keep one master template and change only the offer panel, so the brand block stays identical while the price point and store list change. That discipline also makes the daily route photographs more useful, because a reviewer can tell at a glance which version was playing on which day.