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Comment by mung | Hacker News Reader

My god it's tragic that vertical video has become a legitimate format when it really just arose from people holding their phones wrong.

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"Holding their phones wrong" — you mean, holding a rectangular affordance ergonomically in their hands?

The odd thing to me is that you can't just tell your vertically-oriented phone to produce landscape video. The imaging sensor is square.

The imaging sensor is a rectangle in roughly the same aspect ratio as what is captured by the stills mode.

You can see that in any teardown.

I do agree there's no "right orientation" though since it's subjective. However having a square sensor would be illogical

Yes you are holding it wrong because the resulting video is clearly wrong if you view the video on a TV (same aspect ratio, other orientation), a computer or if you watch movies, or if you, well, see out your eyes. If you want to capture just about any action, it's going to look better in landscape, and that is why EVERYTHING until phones were put in the hands of plebs is shot in landscape.

Now, you could argue that we've gone more mobile, and newer social media formats expect portrait, but, that doesn't change that it's risen because people take videos and never consider, "hmmm, if I turn it around, I get a better picture and it looks more like a TV! Duurrr." Just because it's more popular doesn't mean it's not stupid AF.

What if I record videos for viewing on phones? Do I deserve insults too?

Well you can do what ya like, but I, as a viewer do have the ability to turn my phone to landscape to view landscape videos. What are you shooting? Pile drivers in action?

“Talking head” video is better in vertical orientation for the same reason painters have been creating portraits in vertical orientation for centuries: humans are vertical. Much of TikTok and other networks’ vertical stories are indeed videos of people.

I know plenty of people that don't own a TV or a monitor, they only own a phone and they have a locked to portrait mode. I wouldn't be surprised if you checked the world and there were more of those people than TV owners at this point. Why should they have to make their videos for TV users?

Point-by-point: phones can (should be able to) unlock from portrait for video. As I said, video is generally better in landscape, so it's not really about TVs, TVs are landscape because viewing video is better in landscape. Why anyone has to even argue this OBVIOUS point just demonstrates the militant ridiculousness of people that get on the defensive because they often (not always) put no thought into their video compositions. Vertical video look stupid, get over it.

It's not square. It's usually cut in 4:3 format.

I used to feel the same as you when the Vertical Video Syndrome came out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dechvhb0Meo

Now, I think that there is probably more vertical video made each minute than there is wide.

I really enjoy watching vertical videos on TikTok every day and it is clearly much more ergonomic to hold the phone in the vertical aspect. When I create videos I use two cameras rolling at the same time, one in each aspect. It doubles my edit time, but lets me create content for vertical and horizontal platforms at the same time. Sometimes I have to shoot twice because certain content looks goofy if you try to frame it well for both.

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