Here we go again. A family friend just shared a cute video of their kid dancing to… some song, I can’t even tell, because my brain has already switched off in frustration. The damn video is vertical.
Vertical video is a modern evil. There is no reason to ever shoot a video in vertical mode. Never. No, not even that reason you think you just thought of. You’re wrong. It’s an obscenity.
And yes, people have been complaining about ‘Vertical Video Syndrome’ since the start of the 2010s. But it grows more annoying by the day because there’s no reason it still has to exist – phone makers could have saved us all years ago.
Instagram and Snapchat have tried to embrace the vert video. But the whole thing is like someone broke a window and now they’re calling the hole ‘air conditioning’. There’s an easy fix if we all said enough is enough.
I’m not blaming the poor schlub who shoots the video. OK, just a little. They were lazy, or forgetful, or happy to drag their visual formatting nails down the blackboard of our brains.
The only reason this happens is because it’s just easier to hold a phone upright in one hand and press the record button. It’s more comfortable and it’s steadier. Going sideways needs both hands to keep things smooth.
But here’s the secret: they could just let us hold the phone this way and still give us a widescreen video. It’s that simple!
The only reason we’re forced to twist our wrists awkwardly to get the video we deserve is because Steve Jobs decided that whatever we’re doing with a smartphone camera has to fill the whole screen. And since then no one has decided to fix it.
But filling the screen with picture while we try to shoot a video is entirely irrelevant to what we’re trying to do – take a quick AND USEFUL video.
In case you’re confused by the whole ‘hold it on the angle that matches the frame’ thing, there’s no technical reason video needs to follow that idea the same way photos do.
Photos use all the pixels available, but video, even HD video, uses less pixels and fits comfortably in either direction on any camera from the past five years.
All we need is the software to say “however they’re holding it, make the video work like a video should.”
There’s already one app available that leads the way to the promised land. Horizon, on iOS and Android, doesn’t just let you shoot widescreen video in an upright format. It even has a mode that keeps your video perfectly level no matter which way you rotate your phone.
Now maybe, just maybe, you can think of a specific reason to shoot vertical. Fine. There can be a simple little switch to override the widescreen default and let you do it. Everybody wins.
So come on, Google and Apple. This is long overdue. Fix the phone software. Kill vertical video dead already.