OK, I realize this is about as mundane and pointless as it gets in times like these, but this is a pet peeve of mine that kind of drives me nuts.
I’ve had morning news shows playing in the background while I work at home, and they’ve been showing a lot of home videos that people have been making to pass the time while in quarantine. A lot of them are very clever and creative, but like freakin’ 95% of them are in portrait mode. I understand it may be marginally easier to film using one hand in portrait mode, but these days when phone video is of a quality such that some indie directors are making movies using phone cameras, it looks so bad and amateurish. One video I saw featured two cute toddler twins sitting side by side doing cute things, and the person filming in portrait mode had to pan back and forth between the two.
I’ll do it whenever possible, but in my opinion, the reason people don’t is because it’s harder. We’ve discussed this in the past here. At least for me, using the phone in landscape mode means having to use both hands to hold the phone if I want to be able to see the screen and use the buttons. If I hold it sideways with one hand, I can’t comfortable move my fingers around to hit the buttons without worrying about dropping the phone and my hand is in the way of the screen, so I can’t see anything.
I’d suggest that manufactures should make the sensor big enough so it can film in either mode while in either orientation. However, I think a lot of people would be confused when they have a little tiny (live/preview) picture when they hold the phone upright and film in widescreen. They may not understand that widescreen is going to look small until you rotate the phone.
I had this argument with my wife when we did a live stream. Her point was that most people who watch will be watching on phones and that’s how they like it. Didn’t really convince me; they could turn their phone sideways and get a better view but, as I understand it, that’s the argument.
I understand that argument for casual, personal videos, like filming a kid opening up Christmas presents or something. But there are many videos where people obviously went to a lot of trouble and put a lot of thought into the content, yet still filmed in portrait. It’s just sad. Thanks for that VVS linnk, BTW!
Haha, is that a boomer thing? Maybe in a general grumpy “get off my lawn” sense…?
I don’t really know. I’ve been told this is how the kids are doing it; Portrait is the default mode on the iPhone and they’re sticking to it.
Personally I think they mainly take selfies and don’t consider anything off to the sides to be important, so that affects how they view the entire world.
Most people aren’t making videos to show on the TV anymore. They’re making videos to watch on your phone. Especially if they’re using an app like TikTok which I believe only shoots in portrait.
My adult daughter did a quick recipe video for youtube as something to do. She sent my the raw footage to edit and my #1 request was shoot it in LANDSCAPE!. What is the point of a large screen TV where 2/3 of it are covered in bars?
I think this was the unspoken subtext of my debate with Mrs. 74westy. We are the same age but she is much more involved with social media and I get grumpier every year.
This is a pet peeve of mine as well. I especially dislike when a TV program is showing a video that someone caught with their phone, and instead of black bars on the sides, they put in a magnified and blurred version of the same video.
That being said, I can imagine that there are a few instances when a vertical video makes more sense. Last year in Costa Rica a guy took a video of me jumping off rocks into a waterfall pool, and vertical was the right answer for this one. But those are one or two percent of the total.
They are already big enough for that–a 5 MP sensor is (just barely) enough to do 1080p in either direction, and a 20 MP one is (again just barely) enough to do 4k. (And 80 MP could do 8k.)*
The problem with that is that it changes the framing, zooming/cropping the image from what you would get in the normal orientation. For instance, there is an app called Horizon that has been around for years that makes your video horizontal no matter how you hold the phone–here is what the display of the phone sees and here is what the output looks like.** (The recording was made after the screencap–turns out that the screencap program and recording on Horizon do not play well together.) Any video recorder could build in a similar feature, but nobody bothers.
*Horizon needs a higher resolution than any of those figures because it doesn’t do simple binary portrait or landscape, it has to make room for diagonals, too.
**It would look more stable if the camera was on the axis of rotation of the phone and not up in a top corner.
I used to be a “For the low of God turn your phone over!” But people are taking videos on their phones to show them to other people watching on their phones and they are generally not artistic products that will be saved for posterity. That the minuscule proportion of such videos that end up on the news annoy people is not enough reason to take the trouble to make a higher quality video.
I get that it makes logical sense to have the picture vertical, as you are jumping from the top of the screen to the bottom. If you show it on your phone, people will hold it in vertical orientation and it will look cool.
But if it was a movie of a person jumping off rocks into a pool, like in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, it will still be shot horizontally. Nobody wants to see bars at the movie theatre, and i don’t want to see them on Youtube, lol.
So I would have still shot you horizontally unless you insisted I shoot it vertically. Resolution might have once been an issue, but I can shoot at 4k (and newer cameras even higher). That means for me I can crop to any part of the image I want, and still be at 1080p which is plenty good for Youtube.
Similarily I often shoot with a 360 degree 5k camera. Nobody wants to see a squished 360 degree movie, but the real benefit is that you can compose your movie in post at 1080p, and pick any part of the image, or pan from one part to another, in a horizontal format.
And surely, when your subject is two toddlers sitting side by side, as in the case the OP described, landscape would be a no-brainer. Yes, videos will mostly be viewed on phones, but phones can be held either way.
Yes! It’s not the portrait mode itself that bothers me as much as it is how TV news programs present the videos. Use black or grey or some neutral color for the sidebars instead of a blurred version of what is being shown in the center, fer cryin’ out loud!
Right – Instagram, etc., just conceded to the habit.
It’s a pain in the ass for anyone who gets the footage doing quality video-making or editing, but most people are just make crappy, shitty, dumb-fuck, piece of shit, boring, stupid, dumb-ass, worthless–did I forget to say boring and shitty?–annoying waste of time vanity shots that nobody else wants to see anyway, and that’s what TikTok, etc. are trying to get.
I have to respectfully disagree here. If you had filmed that in landscape mode, it would have looked the same on a tv or computer monitor, only without dead spaces on the sides. Perhaps forcing the portrait perspective directs your eyes more to the action, but eh.
No matter how the dead space on the sides is treated, it still looks bad to me. Something needs to be done to stop this trend! I think this video should be required watching on all newly purchased cellphones before they can be fully activated:
What buttons are you pressing when filming a little video? Start/stop is the volume button. Zoom? People use zoom too much, in my opinion. And if your hand is in the way of the screen, what does that have to do with landscape mode? Wouldn’t your hand be in front of the screen in portrait mode as well?
I’ve been taking video correctly with a smartphone for years, and have no problem holding the phone with one hand and still being able to access the buttons. I just use my thumb, middle and ring fingers to hold the phone and use my index finger to press the start/stop button. And that’s all you need to take your video. Start recording then stop when you’re finished. Do NOT mess with any buttons or controls while filming.
If your hands are too small to do that easily you can even press record before you frame your shot. You should be starting your recording a little early anyway. It’s much easier to trim off the excess at the beginning and end than it is to recover something you missed because your phone decided to be a little slow responding to the record button or you jumped the gun hitting the stop button.
And zoom? You should never zoom while recording. It’s all digital, so you’re just enlarging the image and cropping the edges. You can zoom with more control while editing.