Social networks, add financed “news” sites, etc… everybody appears to need more videos all the time. Why? Because videos are the perfect “content” to force the user to look at advertisements: they are linear, take time to view and one does not know it’s only an advertisement until the video starts playing.
Basically, sites financed by advertisements have re-invented another medium financed by advertisements : the good old TV.
Except that, at the same time, the content must be free and therefore “user generated”. But there is a slight problem with that: creating video is work and the users aren’t that good at it. So the network take whatever they get: portrait mode, poor light and sound, crummy colors and grainy images, everything is accepted.
On a side note: anyone noticed the new app from Apple called “clips”? On the plus side, there is no portrait or landscape mode because the clips are square. On the minus side, it makes creating amateur videos even easier, complete with automatic subtitles and music. Expect even more kittens.
Portrait mode is for portraits, because the human face and body tend to be taller rather than wider (ymmv). I typically faceted with my parents in portrait mode since that fills more of the screen with the part we are interested in: the face.
I watched the Mars video, interesting, but once the Coca-Cola segment came up, I quit. it’s all just a game to grab more eyeballs. This is like an extension of the endlessly scrolling multi-planar web3.0 web site layout that is everywhere.
The idiotic example of the still photo of the Flatiron put me off. Sure, a photo of that building might fit into portrait, but a video would presumable want to show something happening. Like on the street, where things happens. Sideways. I guess some human fly/spiderman-type climbing the building would perhaps be best shot in vertical mode, but that’s going to pretty much be the exception. Let’s be honest here, the vast majority of video is best shot in landscape mode. Most vertical video is shot that way through ignorance, obliviousness or laziness, not as some sort of artistic choice.
The scourge began when some clever person decided that the solution to allowing a person to use their video camera while holding the phone the wrong way was to invent a new video aspect ratio, rather than give them an inferior landscape crop of the portrait mode video that their camera was capturing. Because that would have trained people to hold their phone the right way, or at least have made their friends laugh at them for recording crappier videos.
What fool would shoot a movie or a trailer that can only be viewed on a phone?
Say you are creating a trailer to be distributed via Snapchat. In that case the content is only viewable on a phone and Snapchat is pretty much exclusively portrait mode thsee days. That’s the kind of fool I’m talking about.
Why would I create an insurmountable barrier between my content and the preferred viewing format of two of three groups of my audience in order to save the third group no more effort than turning their wrist?
Depends on the size and value of the three groups. Know your audience.
Yeah, I see vertical video misused a lot, but there’s nothing inherently “wrong” with it. It just seems that way to people because of the history of the technology that prevented such uses as a regular thing. (Though you see portrait-orientation video in fine art, etc.) I’d like to see more video forms.
Yeah, the lack of consistent support is the bigger issue.
There’s nothing wrong with vertical video if it suits the thing being shot and you are going to be viewing it on a vertical formatted device later.
The problem comes from shooting things vertically that could have been shot just as well or better in landscape mode when ultimately it’s going to be viewed on a landscape mode device (computer, youtube, TV.)
Even if it IS intended to be viewed on a phone, turn the phone sideways and, voila, it’s landscape and now compatible with all the other landscape devices!
If you’re unsure, landscape is always the better option just for compatibility’s sake.
One final note: YouTube should really implement something to recognize portrait mode videos and display them accordingly. I DO have the screen real estate for them to still look good.
