I disagree, having seen plenty of poorly-framed footage shot by an inoffensively horizontal phone. I think the distaste stems almost entirely from people being irritated by how portrait video looks on YouTube, coupled with the fact that practically no professionally-shot moving image has been shot in any aspect other than landscape in the past century, so people are conditioned to think that portrait looks wrong.
I think the landscape aspect of live theater sets is simply an artifact of us being a ground-bound terrestrial species. Oh, sure, you gotta put Juliet on her balcony, and maybe lower in a god or two from the flywell, but for the most part, your Lancastrian soldiers will take up so many square feet on stage left as they face off against Richard III and his men of York on stage right, and it’s just the way we used to fight that the battle will take up much more horizontal space than vertical. And I think that, for the most part, really tall theatrical sets are a fairly modern invention, and the standard shape of the proscenium came to be simply because most plays seemed to fit comfortably in that view.
So I think a landscape orientation is simply what we’ve been conditioned to see, based upon the majority of the human actions we normally perform on a stage, and there’s no real reason to cling to that viewpoint when technical limitations do not demand it, except for the fact that, well, we’re all so used to it that anything else looks a bit weird.
There’s a vast community on Youtube and in other places who literally demand 60FPS. Gamers and those who watch gamers. Because videogames that can range from 40FPS into the hundreds look like a bag of flaming dog shit when you only pull out 30FPS worth of sample frames. Often you get tearing. Often there are things that happen so fast you can only see the before and after with a single frame of the action in between. Pretty much all PC gaming footage on Youtube is being done in 60FPS nowadays, and it’s a good thing. People like seeing all the action, instead of small pieces.
Granted the 60FPS does look a little weird when you’re watching footage of real life. You come to realize that people on screen are a lot twitchier than you noticed before because all their facial micro-expressions were averaged out when 30/24 FPS was all that was used.
You seem to be saying that it’s neither a bug nor a feature but simply a historical necessity. I buy that, but I’m not sure it makes sense that we like it simply because it’s what we’re accustomed to seeing it. The problem is that early movies and—until recently—TV have been in a format that has broken this convention, and I think that since the advent of cinema it has really been the movies—and not theater—that have been the greatest influence on our tastes and what we expect. I’ve never seen a stage production, but I’ve seen a lot of movies, an I suspect I’m not a huge outlier.
I do agree mostly, but I’ll also stipulate that most footage shot with phones is at or near ground level, therefore horizontal movement in nature (mostly), so it’s harder to mess up framing because you have a wide FOV, while vertical video requires careful framing. So I’d say you see more inappropriately vertical video, as well as a lot of sloppy horizontal video that still manages to capture our ground dweller’s mostly horizontal context.
But yes, since nearly all video, and practically all professional video is horizontal, it does feel weird and out of the norm when you see vertical video. Also, yes, on all our horizontal screens the black bands make everything vertical seem crappy. But hey, two horizontal vertical black bands are better than something truly stupid like this:
Seeing 16:9 content, mushed into 4:3, then displayed in a 16:9 container. And you can’t even choose to stretch the content out to fill a 16:9 square, which would fix this.
(well, you can, but it requires addons or userscripts. There’s no way to do it using Youtube’s default tools and controls.)
Well, no… those were both landscape, just not widescreen. They weren’t quite square, and the longer dimension was horizontal.
I am sure you are not, though I would argue that television had an even larger influence than the movies did. After all, the vast majority of TV sets have been manufactured in either 4x3 or (much more recently) 16x9 ratios, whereas there have been a great many more ratios available to project movies in, up to and surpassing the width of your fattest CinemaScope presentations. Not everyone has been able to go to a cinema with any regularity, but I would argue that most tastemakers of the moving image have been in possession of a TV set or three.
Yeah, I’d stipulate that. It’s also something that, as you pointed out, most amateurs don’t bother to consider. The thing is, there have never in the history of the world been so many video cameras in the hands of so very many amateur cinematographers before, and since their cameras of choice are generally still designed to be used as telephones, and are thus usually much more comfortably held upright, you get lots of portrait video. I can shoot portrait video quite well and easily on my Droid RAZR M, but shooting proper landscape video is kind of a bitch if I do it one-handed. The trigger button is simply in a terrible place on the screen, with no feedback, and the lens is too close to the edge to completely avoid fingers in the frame if I try to shoot left-handed. If I want to shoot something well, I have to be careful I don’t drop the damned thing. If I need to shoot fast at that oncoming meteorite (or whatever), I’m gonna have to shoot portrait.
But hey, I’m no photographer and certainly no cinematographer, and so until the phone is made more ergonomic when held as a landscape camera, or until the phone shoots landscape while held in portrait mode (using the screen as a perfectly fine smallish viewfinder), I’m not gonna bother to change my habits, and I expect most amateurs to say the same.
Yeah, that’s just lame. There should always be an easy way to fix this simple and commonplace problem.
Don’t mock it, some moron said vinyl was dead, and now look at how many bands are releasing LPs. Mark my words, we’ll all be be using Super8 again in 20 years.
Sure. But I think my point was that I don’t think that wide, short stages are what has driven the current trend towards wider aspect ratios. A scope presentation probably best mimics the width of a stage, yet they are conventionally reserved for films that lack the intimacy and emotional depth that we would associate with stage plays.
I’d agree with that (and I would have hoped from my previous answers that it was obvious I am aware of different aspect ratios in use), but part of film’s influence has been in creating the historic 4:3 TV aspect ratio.
Yeah, exactly, and I think that preserves the through-line from theatrical presentation to today, just as the axle-width of Roman chariots created ruts that later wagons were built to fit within, and eventually the “gauge” of wagons in use at the Killingworth Colliery led George Stephenson to build his first steam locomotives using the same 4’ 8 1/2" gauge, which is the most-common railway gauge in use today. All consumer-grade camcorders used a 4x3 aspect until 16x9 HD camcorders became available about a dozen years ago, and the 16x9 aspect ratio of HD is a direct result of the existence of so many widescreen feature films that look better (or at least larger and easier to see) when presented on a wider screen.
My larger point is that, rather than there being an intrinsic superiority inherent in widescreen presentation, we have been conditioned in the last century to think that it’s better. Movies were square, until, in reaction to the widespread availability of TV, movies tried to regain the aura of spectacle by giving you an image you simply could not get at home. And standard-def TV was square, and fine for most people’s purposes, until HD finally allowed you to get that widescreen spectacle at home, with clearer picture to boot.
And so, when a phone-shot video of, say, a toddler saying something cute in a bathtub is shot portrait-style, no matter how well-framed it is, there will be a chorus of disapproval on the internet claiming that it was shot “wrong” by a “lazy” or “incompetent” videographer. And that’s dumb. If actual useful picture information is inadvertently lost or cropped out by such framing, then by all means, people can squawk. But just bitching about aspect ratio simply because it isn’t the shape that one has grown accustomed to thinking of as superior… well, that’s mindlessly reactionary.
I’ve thought about getting into vinyl. Best argument, in my mind, is that the LP’s can’t fall victim to the loudness war, as CDs can. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but, but given that the 16 bit dynamic range of CDs theoretically dwarfs that of LPs, it’s like saying that “heroin is a less effective painkiller than aspirin because of the potential for abuse.”
