booth_loop_video v1.0.0

name: booth_loop_video description: Produce a silent looping video for a conference booth, kiosk, or lobby screen: size type from reading distance and glance time, one idea per beat, hide the loop seam, check brightness and burn-in risk for screens that run all day, and export to the playback hardware. Use when someone asks for a booth loop, trade show screen video, lobby loop, kiosk video, signage loop, or a seamless loop for a display that plays unattended.

Booth Loop Video

Purpose

Build a silent video loop that a stranger can read while walking past, that restarts without a visible jump, and that survives running all day on a real panel through a real player. The loop is finished only when it passes on the actual screen in the actual room, not when the render completes.

Workflow

1. Pin down the screen before designing anything. Get the panel size and native resolution, the picture height in inches, the farthest and closest viewer distances, the placement (booth, lobby, kiosk, video wall, portrait or wide), and what plays the file: signage player, smart TV from USB, or a small computer. If the hardware is unknown, design to the defaults in references/loop-seam-and-export.md and say that the hardware is unverified.
2. Size the type from distance. Run scripts/booth_loop_calc.py with the farthest distance and the panel picture height. It applies the rule of 1 inch of letter height per 10 feet of viewing distance (1.5 times that for comfortable reading), converts to pixels on the canvas, and prints the safe areas. Nothing on screen goes below the minimum it prints. Detail that does not fit at that size moves to a handout, a QR target, or a person at the booth.
3. Write beats, not a video script. One idea per beat: one headline, one image, one call to action at most. A passing viewer gets 1 to 2 seconds, so each beat must land on its own, in any order, because nobody promised to watch from beat 1. Set beat length from dwell: short beats of about 3 to 6 seconds where people walk past, longer holds where they queue or sit. Read every beat aloud from the farthest distance and cut words until each beat finishes inside its time.
4. Lay out inside safe areas. Text, logos, prices, and QR codes stay inside title safe, the central 90 percent of the frame. Faces and key imagery stay inside action safe, the central 93 percent. Backgrounds bleed full frame. Numbers for common canvases are in references/legibility-and-safe-area.md.
5. Hold contrast under room light. Body text at 4.5:1 or better against the worst background behind it, large text at 3:1 or better, following WCAG 2.2 AA. Put text on a solid panel or scrim instead of over changing photography.
6. Choose the seam strategy before rendering: return to start, crossfade the end into the start, ping-pong for motion that reads in reverse, or a neutral bridge beat. For the crossfade, use the tested ffmpeg recipe in references/loop-seam-and-export.md or the command printed by the calculator: split off the first F seconds as the head, crossfade the main body into it at offset D minus 2F, and ship the D minus F output. Keep text out of the faded seconds.
7. Design for all-day panels while you design, not after. No element sits in the same pixels for the whole loop: move the logo between beats or drop it from some beats. Avoid pure white fields, baked-in black bars, and maximum brightness as a design crutch. The full panel care list is in references/screen-test-checklist.md.
8. Export to the hardware. Default: panel native resolution, constant frame rate (30 fps unless the site chain expects 25 or 50), H.264 in MP4, yuv420p, no audio track at all. Name the file with size, duration, and version, for example booth-loop_1920x1080_29s_v1.mp4.
9. Verify the file, then test on the screen. Probe with ffprobe and read back codec, pixel format, frame rate, resolution, duration, and the absence of an audio stream. Then run every item in references/screen-test-checklist.md on the real screen and player: three cycles watched for the seam, read-aloud at distance and at a side angle, brightest-hour check, power cut and auto-restart, and the panel care settings.

Output Contract

Deliver all of the following:

• The loop file, named with resolution, duration, and version, plus the ffprobe read-back that proves its specs.
• The beat list: one line per beat with its text, its image, and its seconds, showing one idea per beat and the total loop time.
• The planning numbers from the calculator: viewing distance used, minimum and comfortable letter heights in pixels, and the title safe and action safe boxes for the canvas.
• The seam strategy chosen and, for a crossfade, the duration, fade, and offset used.
• The screen test results against references/screen-test-checklist.md, item by item, including anything that failed and what changed because of it.
• A panel care note for the operator: brightness setting used, which static elements were moved or removed, the downtime schedule, and any panel refresh settings to leave on.

Operating Rules

• Every number in this skill traces to a source in the references or to a calculator run on the real panel. Do not invent a brightness figure, a bitrate ceiling for a player you have not checked, or a viewing distance you did not measure or get from the venue.
• Quality beats cadence. A loop that fails the seam test or the distance read test does not ship with a note attached. It gets fixed or reported as not ready.
• Silent means no audio track, not a muted audio track. Players and TVs treat those differently on restart.
• Never trust the design monitor. Legibility, contrast, and the seam are only real at the panel, in the room light, from the viewer's spot.
• A QR code is a claim that it scans from a stated distance in that room light. Test it there or remove the claim and the code.
• Do not promise that a file will play on hardware nobody has named. State the assumed player in the delivery note, and flag the exact TV or player test as still open when it has not happened.
• Bulky detail lives in references/: legibility-and-safe-area.md (type sizing, contrast, safe area numbers), loop-seam-and-export.md (seam strategies, the tested crossfade recipe, export specs per hardware), screen-test-checklist.md (on-site pass and fail checks, brightness and burn-in care), and worked-example.md (a complete booth loop from script to screen test).