ARGHL WHARGL! Encroaching black bars! Unprofessional! Bad John Ford, bad! Turn your camera!
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Ever consider that perhaps he meant to bookend the opening?
Speaking of aspect ratios, I think that the bbsâs âexpand to fillâ setting is annoying when trying to edit text on an ipad.
My fingers are coarser than my eyes. Sometimes I like to position my cursor just so. Thatâs where pinch to zoom comes in handy.
Itâs not about black bars for me. Itâs about the fact that people who are filming in vertical mode also typically are awful at keeping their subject in frame and donât often have the presence of mind to include important context off to either side. So when new mommy is excitedly filming her toddler walking for the first time, and doing it vertically, thereâs better than even odds that little Billy will be out of frame half the time, and we never see that fast moving frisbee coming until itâs more than half-way across the frame.
Portrait has itâs place. That place is in the hands of people who actually are intending to use that type of aspect ratio. The landscape mode is a safety net for bad photographers and cinematographers. Typically walls are more interesting (because theyâre accessible to us ground dwellers) than ceilings except for a few special cases where the camera would actually be pointed at the ceiling on purpose anyway.
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Eh, I just donât care what other viewers think about most of the things I record on my phone. Holding the phone sideways is significantly more awkward and uncomfortable one-handed, as itâs still mostly designed to be held upright in one-handed applications (and two-handed in âlandscapeâ applications), and as often as not, itâs not convenient for me to use both hands to shoot. If itâs something important, or something for which I feel a landscape aspect ratio is appropriate, then Iâll take the trouble to shoot landscape. Otherwise I wonât bother. And Iâm really not about to change this habit because anyone else doesnât like it. People that get bent outta shape when they see portrait video need to re-examine their priorities. Get miffed by real offenses against the laws of nature⌠like misused apostrophes or something.
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AviSynth has always supported rotating videos by 90 degree increments:
http://avisynth.nl/index.php/TurnLeft
Can be called as:
TurnLeft(clip $name)
TurnRight(clip $name)
Turn180(clip $name)
AviSynth also has a decent cropping syntax, and even auto-cropping plugins as well as pan-scan plugins that will automatically detect black borders as well as the focus in the frame and center on that while cropping to a given AR.
Seriously, AviSynth is awesome, and an incredibly powerful tool if you do much video editing.
It does, however, require you learn a fairly easy and rudimentary scripting language, and know how to call its API to intervene between decoding and getting passed along to your transcoder, although many transcoders already have native support for AVS scripts.
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"So if you are shooting a video that will only be played on a phone, "
FYI google just adjusted their algorithm so that website optimized for mobile will be given priority in page rankings. âOnly on a phoneâ doesnât pack the same pinch as it might have at some point. Plus add âonly on a tabletâ to that as well, as all tablets also rotate and can be used vertically as well. Video players are at fault here.
Maybe when we had to choose one of the other, horizontal won out. Those times are no longer. Screens they are a-changinâ. The evo-psych arguments, their strength is waningâŚ
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I agree. Why the fuck do we let people who havenât graduated film school even have children in the first place?!
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I didnât say people shouldnât record stuff. I said, itâs easier to screw up and end up with poor framing using portrait mode, and that people tend not to pay much attention. Iâm sure youâre very competent and super experienced at this whole iPhone cinematography deal, because youâre an exceptional individual who is above average at paying attention to what youâre looking at. But most to nearly all portrait videos I see fail to actually record whatever the user found interesting, or rather, the user usually doesnât do a good job of keeping whatever theyâre recording in frame.
Which is to say, most amateur video is crap no matter what orientation itâs in. That doesnât mean people shouldnât film. Just that itâs very easy to make crap by doing something one way, and slightly less easy to make crap doing it the other way.
People should do whatever makes them happy. Iâm just pointing out why I think thereâs a lot of hate for portrait videos.
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Consuming media⌠like watching videos? And can be easily moved to a different orientation? Things that donât depend on having a keyboard or producing anything?
Sounds like youâve made the case for these devices. You say theyâre secondary-use devices, but theyâre obviously being bought and used in large numbers for something.
Perhaps, but youâre also not supposed to drive barefoot. 
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Oh yeah? Then what are these for?
You donât need the film school if you stick up with that one single weird rule.
Whoever cannot do something as simple should perhaps not be let to have children.
I donât have a tablet. My mom does, and uses it primarly for games. Uses laptop in landscape mode for videos, and is technically skilled enough that she never recorded a portrait video. Granted, it is a small sample.
Games, mostly, for the tablets; voice/sms comm for the phones. The touchscreen-only interface is not good for much else. What did happen to actual tactile-feedback buttons???
I see. So defining traveling more accurately as traveling under own power (walking/running for the shoes).
Thanks for this!
Although itâs not really designed for ordinary consumers.
Heck, Iâm a programmer and the website made me short of breath and nervous.
Itâs a typical GNU project (and I say that as a FSF member) - tone-deaf to the general public. At least this one doesnât have an obnoxious name like âGIMPâ (seriously? Why donât they just call it âCRIPâ or âFEEBâ and be done with it).
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Work fine for watching videos, too. And the draw there is that you can watch those videos anywhere (so long as your internet connection is working) - laptops can be a pain to use (for long periods) in the bathroom, or in bed, or while a passenger in a carâŚ
Other uses are a kind of beside the point, but since you keep mentioning them, with the right tablet you can do a lot. I also occasionally use mine for drawing, but itâs got a proper digitizer in it - pulling out a stylus to draw on the screen may be slightly cheating, though itâs something I canât do with any desktop I have access to. When I want to use it for full work, I just pair a separate keyboard to it. It serves me just as well as a mini laptop, with the bonus of touchscreen and leaving the keyboard behind when I either donât need it or when I have to use it in a place where thereâs no surfaces a laptop would work on.
On the contrary, laptops have a significant advantage of the screen angle being adjustable. I use the laptop in the bed for prolonged periods; it rests on my stomach and the screen is in the correct angle and stays there. The ebook reader has an issue here.
Yes, lots of niche uses. Could be useful e.g. for bolting on the side of a moulding machine instead of the original control interface thatâs 10 or more times expensive.
There are input devices for that.
How does it keep the screen in the proper angle? Dedicated holder? Improvised one from books?
If you have to hold it in hand, you need a wearable device instead (CastAR, where are you?). If you donât, you have a surface thatâs good enough for a laptop too - and you arenât doomed to a choice between a horizontal screen or awkward improvisations.
I guess my 15 month old doesnât count, nor the hours of video I have of him.
My point is - in 30 years I want to be able to watch those videos. That means I want them in a format that fits standards as they are today, so moving forward they will be easier to change into standards of tomorrow. iPhone video is decent except for the fact it isnât a fixed frame rate and causes issues with some editors. My Cannon camcorder creates industry standard 1080p/60f AVC High 4.2 vdeo, and ironically itâs designed to be held in a landscape mode. Thatâs 1920 pixels wide and 1080 pixels vertical, that doesnât change just because you rotated the camera, editors arenât going to care, a different video container wonât care - it will still be 1920x1080 with the video rotated 90 degrees to the orientation of the format.
Sure they arenâtâŚbut I bought a proper camera to record my sonâs moments and donât rely on my phone to handle that. The fact people have cell phones and tables that can be oriented in any position imaginable isnât lost on me, the fact they would choose to watch a 1080p movie on them is.
Iâm not anti-portrait because itâs hard to watch on anything that isnât handheld. Iâm anti-portrait because it adds another layer of complexity in something you might have a desire to keep one day. Cause at some point I hope I can just âjack inâ and âplayâ these videos in my mind or something to that effectâŚand the idea of portrait video playing in a landscape biological orientation seems unnerving.
edit
To point out something here to the group. Things like DVD or Bluray arenât variable resolution containers just because you see an output of 4x3 or 16x9 - that doesnât mean that is what the raw video actually is. DVD video is 720x480 - period. Typical video containers have a display/pixel aspect ratio which handles the ratio of how the video is played back. So while you see 16x9 the raw video itself is 3x2 or (for a Bluray 16x9 is the raw format.)
Yes, yes there are. But a digitizer built into a desktop monitor are pretty rare, expensive, and harder to accommodate. Separate digitizers donât let you draw directly on the image youâre working on. And I really donât need an additional single-use gadget when I have this nice sheet-of-paper-sized portable display that I can draw directly on and use wherever Iâm comfortable, and can then use the same display for other thingsâŚ
We have different experiences, there. I have found the tablet to be significantly more comfortable to use in these situations, especially if Iâm not doing anything that particularly needs a keyboard. Heatâs been less of an issue, too. I can put up with holding it with a hand or propping it up with something in return for the benefits.
When I have the keyboard with it Iâm using a very basic cover, which handles keeping the screen in position when I need that. Itâs just a simple wrap - a few thin panels connected together by fabric, no solid joints, some well-placed magnets - which essentially converts the tablet into a laptop, and is just as fast to use as opening up a laptop would be. And it still gives the added ability to fold things with the keyboard completely out of the way with flip of the wrist so it can be used like a plain tablet again when needed.
Iâve been doing this for a while, and using the tabletâs been a lot less awkward than the small laptops I used to use in full work situations away from a desk. And when Iâm wanting to work where thereâs nice workspace to sit at, itâs definitively no worse to use than one of those small laptops was.
Iâve tried it both ways; Iâm probably not going back no matter how much you try to convince me Iâm doing it wrong. Itâs entirely possible something even more convenient will arise in the future (I have hopes for wearable HUD displays, though they donât have what Iâd want yet), but for now this has been the best and most affordable option for me.
I should note that Iâm not trying to convince you that this is right for you. Just giving an example of how someone can find more utility in this type of device than youâre giving them credit for. YMMV.
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AviSynth is all that and then some and can handle a lotâŚ
But circling back to what Chenille points out - what if you need to send it as a DVD or Bluray to someone? You are back to landscape mode - because that is what the formats are designed around. Editing can be a PITA - long term storage, interpolation, and future use doesnât get any easier.
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Itâs not THAT bad⌠really itâs complex enough to do things as good as or better than pro level software, and at the same time itâs fairly easy enough to load a video and do some basic stuff. The filtering capability alone is enough reason to learn how to use it. You can take a show like Farscape, that was shot on film and then put on DVD in a fairly high bitrate, strip out a lot of the film grain, clean up the edges, fix some contrast issues and have something that looks as good as or if not better than the original for 1/4 the space. Not to mention it has kick ass levels of IVTC capability.
Besides, identity politics are complicated.
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