10 years ago, a person would be insulted for filming a video in portrait instead of landscape. Now, old landscape videos are being cropped and resized to fit in a portrait player.
Their children's eyes will grow closer and closer together from one generation to another until no one has depth perception past the front of their face. /s
I still don’t like vertical videos. My natural field of view is landscape and portrait feels crowded and stressful. Also vertical videos have to be watched 2-3 times to see everything, because the person filming has to pan the camera so much, and they usually move too quickly. It’s like everyone forgot that a phone can be rotated.
I'm relegated to just talking shit on people who clearly have a copy of the original video, but upload it to the internet by playing it on their screen and shakily pointing their phone's camera at it rather than just uploading the fucking file.
I wouldn't mind quite so much if it was because the people filming that way believed it looked better. But the real reason is usually because they are too dumb to think of turning their phone on its side.
The horizontal display is meant to reflect our natural vision which is also a horizontal aspect ratio. There are niche scenarios like skyscrapers but the vast majority of the time it's correct to stay horizontal and frame the shot properly.
My unpopular opinion is that whatever you record should consider the format it'll be viewed in as well as the orientation of the subject in the video. Is it going to be viewed on a phone, one handed, while someone is eating or pooping? Then vertical might make sense. If the subject fits better in a vertical video, then that makes sense as well.
Fuck it. Let's just record in squares and they can be cropped either way. The circular lense doesn't just record in portrait or landscape, right?... Wait... Or does it?.... It's actually a circular lense but the sensor itself might be rectangular.... Hmm....
Shooting I'm square crop has been a thing for a while now, it means clients can re-crop the same footage for different outputs. And usually means framing is a nightmare and never really works out well for any of the output formats.
Why would you do that? People don't even watch shows in portrait even when they use their phones. They watch short form content designed to fill idle moments. It is nearly exclusively bullshit filler or one person content. Real content will continue to be viewed in landscape forever.
On one hand, most of them are just selfies anyway, so portrait mode makes sense to frame the only subject and thing worth looking at. It also is easier to watch on a phone held with just one hand.
On the other, if you're taking shots of the landscape put that fucking shit in landscape mode. Please.
I don't mind either way to watch something. But what really shits me is the vertical video that has added padding on the sides to view in landscape. Or the other way around. I can't see anything when watching on my phone either way then.
Like it was impossible for websites to display properly. Especially when you want to watch the horizontal video that was uploaded to a vertical based site on a horizontal monitor (I'm looking at you, Instagram). Then you're left with ~9% of your monitor area and you can't even read the fucking text on the video.
I understand that you need to adapt when most people watch videos on phones now, but forcing people to install an app just to get all your user data is a pretty scummy move. Also, I may want to use my PC instead for a multitude of reasons.
One day TV makers are going to switch to 9 by 16 screens, vertical portrait mode TVs on the wall. Im from the future. Check back in 10 years, you will see.
the problem with that, and a big reason why it probably won't be adapted, is that portrait mode shows you fuck all, it's good for showing one person (you know like a portrait) but if you want to show multiple people you have so much deadspace top and bottom. Landscape is just aesthetically better
Every time I see someone film vertically I send them this YT video /watch?v=xL23Xvv1Pis (was not sure if I'm allowed to post links here). I just think it's a brilliant and underappreciated parody.
TBF I kind of got used to portrait videos but I still block YT shorts and alike as most videos in that format are garbage anyways.
Insulted? Vines videos were mostly portrait. 2013-2014 were most-likely its hay day. Vines is dead now, but cell phone videos in portrait were posted to Vines a lot.
Now if you mean music videos or cinema, yeah, portrait would be odd.
Sometimes you'll see a landscape video letterboxed into a portrait video, just to make sure it's terrible no matter which way you view it (but extra bad watching on a landscape monitor). So I don't see this as a badge of anything.
On a sidenote, I've noticed video cropping is pretty nice on a phone (widescreen+landscape) depending on the content (I got an OLED phone free because the screen is cracked). Like Wall-e is pretty good like that. Also the music video for Long-Legged Larry (some things are cut off but not enough that it detracts from understanding)
But people still don’t find diagonal eyes attractive, we will never mutate to having vertically-aligned eyes. Horizontal video supremacy is established by nature. Surgery goes a long way this days but, where would they put your nose?