Designing and rendering for output on an HD LCD monitor 16:9

Question

Hi,
I've just completed an animation at 720 x 480 pixels.
I made sure that all my images imported were larger than I needed, just in case.
I need this to be played on a 42 inch monitor 1080 p.
I just realized that 720 x 480 is going to be pixelated on that size.
what output settings do I need to choose to make it look good on 42 inch plasma 1080p
If this is a dumb question I'm sorry, then please point me to some tutorials. All I can find are tutorials on how to do whiz bang effects, there aren't many simple ones for stuff like this.

Answer 1

It depends on what device you will use (ie, connect to the LCD TV) to feed the content.
Widescreen DVDs are always 720x480 anamorphic (like the NTSC DV Widescreen preset in AE), and if all other variables are good (source material, encoding, etc),  they can and do look terrific. Contrary to popular belief, there evidently are other aspects to image quality, besides pure pixel count.
If you want better than that and send HD video to your TV or monitor, it can't be a DVD. A DVD-Video disc is always standard definition. So, it has to be a Blu-Ray disc,  or hook-up a computer display output to the LCD TV, or use one of the very affordable HDMI-capable media players (such as the Western Digital TV, or Popcorn Hour, for example).
In all of these cases, you can pick the HDTV 1080 Composition preset in AE, with the frame rate you need. The resulting Composition will be 1920x1080 with square pixels.
For Blu-Ray output you need an authoring application like Adobe Encore and a Blu-Ray burner (and player, obviously).
To send HD video from a media player like the the WD TV, or from a computer hooked up to your TV, you usually want to encode a high-bitrate H264 or MPEG-2 video file.
Since this is too broad in reach, once you figure out which route you want, let us know and we'll try to help with the details.