I remember looking at the Myst CDs with resedit. Many, many videos, all of them tiny. and not neccesarily conventionally shaped.
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Worst example ever.
Quick video of my kid doing something cute, yah!
Now what?
You are going to want to keep that video right? I mean your iphone is going to get replaced in at least two years, and you are always going to watch that precious video on a sub 6" screen. Oh, fine you have a tablet nowâŚmaybe one day those will move past the antiquated 4x3 aspect (black bars for all).
So here you have a video that looks bad on anything that you canât hand hold, when all you needed to do was turn the phone and possibly take a step back.
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So . . . we have one group here saying we donât know everything so should allow for different aspect ratios and another group who apparently never get up from behind their computers insisting that the video should perfectly fit the screen they stare at all day.
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Sounds like this could be fixed by making âsmart phonesâ with smarter defaults. Want portrait? - push a button.
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So, youâre also against close-ups?
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Yes. This is how I structure my life: I let people I donât care about decide what I will do.
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Wow. âFilming toddlersâ is really the worst example? Have you even been within six feet of toddler? My guess is no, you havenât, because six feet is pretty much the distance that I would have to put between myself and a 2 foot tall human in order to put them in the frame at landscape orientation. Did you know that toddlers like to be real close to people? Sometimes they even sit on you; when this happens, sometimes I want to capture more detail than just the space between their forehead and their chin (which is pretty much all you can get at distances under a foot).
Moreover, not all clips of kids are filmed in nice open spaces where that is option. Ever try filming in a car? A small room? You canât get the requisite distance; shooting in landscape gives you a bunch of crap in the walls and half of your subject is out of frame. The fact that people have displays and cameras which can change with such fluidity is amazing.
If only I had qualified the statement you quoted with some sort of conditional statement like âwhen convenientâ⌠Oh wait! I totally did!
Anyway, I used to be in the anti-portrait mode camp, but after this thread, hardline attitudes like yours have made me realize that I am completely okay with it now. Cheers.
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Sounds quite like âlaw obedienceâ.
Edit: Or most jobs.
Exactly the opposite.
Yeah, that whole wave of graphical adventure games that used 3D graphics but existed before real-time 3D rendering all made use of still images on screen as much as possible, with only those regions of the scene with changing elements rendered as movies. So you ended up with a bunch of arbitrarily proportioned videos in the files.
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Show me a phone that uses film, and Iâll eat my nonexistent hat!
Todo: build a Minox-like spy cam into a desktop phone caseâŚ
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Film for an iPhone:
On the plus side, I think that means you havenât committed to any more than putting a sandwich or something on your head before you eat it.
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Even those who are using landscape oriented monitors probably wonât watch many smartphone videos on full screen mode. People may have a personal preference for landscape videos, but thereâs no need for websites to make them look wrong. Higher quality videos are probably still going to be shot horizontally with a better camera, so I donât see it making that much difference anyway.
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Just for that, Iâm going to eat Werner Herzogâs hat instead, if I ever see him.
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I agree with the wider point, but Iâd say pages are essentially horizontally oriented. The text direction is what matters, as unlike with video youâre not supposed to view the whole page at once.
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how i read boingboing
The horizontal orientation isnât as pleasent, though it does give a wider keyboard. Itâs a 3:4 device, so either orientation is fine.
Who says I donât care? I care very much that people are dictating how others use technology when the technology allows the freedom to do whatever you want. Using things âwrongâ is how amazing discoveries are made.
The only real problem with portrait videos is how youtube and others display them. If youtube and Facebook detected portrait videos and made the player taller on the page to compensate nobody would complain - people would probably actually like it and be more inclined to use portrait mode. Instead they make it really small with black bars on the side. Which is pretty insane when you think about it, considering all of the web page elements are more or less arbitrarily sized.
Of course YouTube doesnât do a great job with giving you a smartly-sized video on the screen in general. I wouldnât be surprised if eventually they upgrade it and do something better, and include a portrait setting, as itâs rather lackluster as it is.
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Or how unnecessary techsupport calls are made.
They laughed at Einstein. But they also laughed at Bozo the clown.
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