Do you film video in portrait ? You’re a moron.

I’ve written before about my annoyance about people not treating photos with as much respect as they should, documenting moments of a lifetime on shit cameras on my phone. This annoyance is similar.

People filming video in portrait.

I know it’s REALLY silly of me to get so wound up by it, but I do. People are using their phones to record video more and more, and rightly so, you can get incredible High Definition picture quality out of these tiny handsets. The thing is, as soon as you flip the phone around and film video in portrait, you ruin it all. Here’s an example – Image this is a video of the Thames filmed in landscape. Fills the screen right up, you can see all the detail..

Take the same image, and ‘film it in portrait’..

Instantly, it’s all squished down, and over two thirds of screen space show black, so you get a horrid thin strip of video.

I know you probably could argue that ‘I’m only looking at the video on my phone’ – which might be true, but stuff like your childs first steps, or a friends wedding etc are important memories that you’ll want to keep forever. Stuff that you’ll probably want to look at on the big screen in a few years time, heck something your KIDS might want to look at when they’re grown up, and more than likely it won’t be on a tiny phone. Digital storage is so cheap, small, and almost endless, we’ll be creating more and more content, and keeping it longer and longer, it doesn’t decay like tapes and film, what you record now of your family, could be viewed by future generations for years to come. It’s all the more reason to ‘future proof’ it, and record in the highest possible quality, the right way round.

I’m not perfect, I’ve recorded important stuff in portrait, and it irks me.. G’s first steps for example.

J’s I managed to get the right way.

It’s really something small, just flipping your camera around 90 degrees, but it makes a massive difference to how videos look and are displayed for now, and years to come.