If phones could record in landscape even though the phone is held vertically it would help.
What annoys me is when TVs show a vertical video… with a blurred version
of the same video surrounding it.
(Hope that makes sense… i can’t find any examples.)
In the early days of video displays for computers there was a brief period where at least some monitors were oriented portrait-style. To mimic the normal arrangement of 8.5x11 or A4 paper. Many dedicated word-processing systems had these, and some external monitors for early Apple products could switch orientations.
Modern tablets do the same.
For myself as a software guy I found the slow migration from fairly square monitors to them being short & wide to be a creeping anti-feature. The screen held far less of what I wanted (more lines of code or content) and far more of what I didn’t care about (unused whitespace on the right). To this day I have my PCs configured with the Start menu running up the left side to make the remaining useable screen real estate taller, not wider.
The larger point being that we’ve collectively wandered all over the map as to aspect ratio and portrait vs. landscape for different use cases. I predict we’ll keep wandering for awhile yet.
A lot of (most?) monitors regardless of what system they’re running on can do this. I’m pretty sure all six monitors I have around the house swivel and can be made vertical. Windows 11 supports both orientations, as does MacOS. I’ve seen some programmers prefer this orientation as they can see more of their code.
Personally, I think it’s pretty simple. The default alignment of the phone is vertical. Most of the time people use it vertically for talking, texting, browsing, etc…
So when people fire up the camera, they continue to hold it vertical, because that’s how you hold a phone in their minds. Most are not thinking about framing, etc… they’re just using the video mode on the phone and not really thinking about it past that.
That would be a big help, although to do it right, it would probably take yet another camera aligned 90 degrees off from the others.
One other point…
This is true if your subject is a single person. But if your subject is two or more people conversing or otherwise interacting, which is the vast majority of video, then a horizontal aspect ratio is better.
I had a coworker who rotated one of his monitors to vertical for looking at code — he kept the other horizontal.
Brian
Employ The Safe Word
Most phones could do that now - the resolution of phone camera sensors is typically big enough that a 4K frame could be cropped out of it in either orientation - all it needs is the software to decide to crop out a landscape video from the vertically-oriented sensor
How do kids today watch tv or movies on their smartphones? Do they turn to horizontal or keep the vertical and watch the much smaller picture?
Vertical videos are a thing that infuriate me well beyond their actual importance. I have this inner voice that says “come on, I want to see what’s going on beyond those edges!” I have gone so far as to install an extension that blocks shorts on youtube (they are required to be vertically oriented).
From what I’ve seen, turning their phones to horizontal.
If they have that habit, that gives them less excuse for not doing so for their own videos, at least those longer than a few seconds.
If they have the intent of sending those videos to a TV station, or are creating a homemade movie using their phones, maybe.
If they’re making videos for themselves, or others, to watch on phones, where portrait orientation is the default way most of them use their phones for most purposes, why would they bother to rotate their phones in the first place?
I absolutely hate that. The extra motion draws my eye away from what I’m trying to watch.
The solution is a phone that records landscape and portrait simultaneously and defaults to landscape when downloaded.
Because they would get much better images horizontally, for the most part. The world is horizontal.
I imagine that the answer is, “they don’t care.” If a smartphone is your primary media source, you’re watching portrait-format videos all the time already.
Unfortunately, I have to admit that this is fighting a lost battle, which is something I hate.
I compare the oddness of losing better pictures, which all the video cameras for decades were striving for, with the oddness of losing better sound, which all the stereo systems for decades were striving for. The future was supposed to be functionally better in all ways.
Convenience and habit has overtaken function, or rather function has shifted to a different path that few if anyone predicted. Smartphones were in fact predicted by many because they seemed to embody all the richness of the future squeezed into a pocket. That’s mostly true. But richness took a turn somewhere. I wonder if it will return, or if the next turn will be even odder.
Pocket? The chips are getting small enough for subcutaneous insertion, but most of our generation will resist the tap into the optic nerve to get image capture and playback.