Smartphones have been part of our lives for almost a decade-and-a-half now.
What is going on inside the minds of people still insist on holding the phone vertically while recording a video?
When filming people, it makes them appear bigger in the frame.
Never-mind how that frame is displayed - that’s not entering into the cameraman’s thought process.
I understand portrait mode when you are close to the subject, but vertical videos of things that are a distance away… ARRRGGGHHH!!!
Some pictures are just better in portrait mode. Pictures of humans, for example, are better vertical. There’s a reason that vertical pictures is called portrait, and why painted portraits of humans are generally vertical. It might not look so good played back on Youtube, but maybe that’s a flaw with Youtube, not the video.
Because whenever I try to hold the phone horizontally, I put my thumb over the lens.
Because Vine (RIP), Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok are designed for vertical videos. I suspect they are designed as such because we hold our phones vertically and they are phone apps.
Because the makers of phones refuse to put in a square CCD to allow holding the phone vertically (which feels somehow more natural) to get a frame that can be shaped to whatever you want. Of course, very few people want to do any modification to the video, even so much as to snip off the part where the phone gets put down. Square video would be a lot more tolerable than this 9x16 nonsense.
So does shaving.
What if they don’t want to be shaved?
And they want you to stay on the app and scroll and scroll and scroll and consume content for as long as possible; this can be done with one hand holding the phone and a flip of the thumb, if the format is vertical; not quite so easy to do that on a portrait-format app.
Vertical video persists to feed the doomscrolling habit it has created.
Because viewing devices have, in many cases, shifted to vertical. I’m a photographer and do a little video. I still do video horizontally for the most part, but I’ve long since accepted that vertical is perhaps best for phone sharing videos. That’s the way we usually hold our phones both for viewing and recording, especially if you’re doing it one-handed. Sorry, that’s just the default orientation now that technology has changed. Get used to it. As I get older, I shift more and more vertical.
Obligatory youtube:
Brian
I recently retired from nearly 40 years of tech support at RI School of Design Film/Video - and one of the most challenging skills to get into the heads of students was to ‘see what your viewer will see, not what you see when you point the camera’.
Note that that is from at least 12 years ago. Things have changed since then. I loved that video back in the day. Now … not so much.
Something like three-quarters of videos are consumed on phone, making vertical make sense.
This site confirms that number and also posits we should be shooting vertical (and, as much as I hate to say, I agree if your target is mobile, shorts, or TikTok.)
And vertical is likely what/how they’re seeing … ergo … I far prefer horizontal media for traditional media consumption, though. Like, by far.
As one who worked in the TV biz, it always bugs me what I see viewer videos sent to the station of events like hail storms, fires, accidents, parades (or just about anything) that were shot vertically. The videos show up in the center of the screen with blurred bars or black on the sides. If you’re shooting a video that you’re doing to share with a TV station, shoot it in the TV format. But that’s me. Because of my TV background it wouldn’t even occur to me to shoot video vertically.
On the other hand, if you’re going to post it online to Youtube or Shorts, where more viewers are – you gotta make a decision. Not that people are thinking in the moment, but even news clips make some sort of sense to shoot vertical if you hope they go viral. That said, most news footage is better horizontal to provide more context.
If they go viral, what’s going to spread is the news clip version. Which is going to be vertical with the bars on the sides. And which is then going to get additional bars at the top and bottom when it’s viewed on a vertical phone. So the viewers on a vertical phone will see a vertical video… shrunk down to a tiny space in the middle of the screen, surrounded on all sides by thick, empty margins.
I highly doubt that’s what’s going through their minds during an “Oh, SHIT look at that!!” moment.
Huh. I usually see vertical vid, no news clip, no stripes, when I watch Youtube shorts (I don’t do TikTok.) This is consumption on an iPhone, not a desktop. If a horizontal video ends up on Shorts, then it gets the bars, or is a poor vertical crop of the original.