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mung | 3 years ago

My god it's tragic that vertical video has become a legitimate format when it really just arose from people holding their phones wrong.

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derefr|3 years ago

"Holding their phones wrong" — you mean, holding a rectangular affordance ergonomically in their hands?

The odd thing to me is that you can't just tell your vertically-oriented phone to produce landscape video. The imaging sensor is square.

ulfw|3 years ago

It's not square. It's usually cut in 4:3 format.

dagmx|3 years ago

The imaging sensor is a rectangle in roughly the same aspect ratio as what is captured by the stills mode.

You can see that in any teardown.

I do agree there's no "right orientation" though since it's subjective. However having a square sensor would be illogical

mung|3 years ago

Yes you are holding it wrong because the resulting video is clearly wrong if you view the video on a TV (same aspect ratio, other orientation), a computer or if you watch movies, or if you, well, see out your eyes. If you want to capture just about any action, it's going to look better in landscape, and that is why EVERYTHING until phones were put in the hands of plebs is shot in landscape.

Now, you could argue that we've gone more mobile, and newer social media formats expect portrait, but, that doesn't change that it's risen because people take videos and never consider, "hmmm, if I turn it around, I get a better picture and it looks more like a TV! Duurrr." Just because it's more popular doesn't mean it's not stupid AF.

kingcharles|3 years ago

I used to feel the same as you when the Vertical Video Syndrome came out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dechvhb0Meo

Now, I think that there is probably more vertical video made each minute than there is wide.

I really enjoy watching vertical videos on TikTok every day and it is clearly much more ergonomic to hold the phone in the vertical aspect. When I create videos I use two cameras rolling at the same time, one in each aspect. It doubles my edit time, but lets me create content for vertical and horizontal platforms at the same time. Sometimes I have to shoot twice because certain content looks goofy if you try to frame it well for both.