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PSA: Don’t Shoot Vertical Videos

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Anybody who’s visited YouTube recently will know there’s a serious problem with some videos: the videographer held their phone wrong way when they recorded it.

Vertical videos on the web is a huge problem at the moment, and one that we can easily prevent. Nobody wants to watch videos with huge black bars on the left and right, it feels like you’re missing most of what’s actually happening in the scene. Vertical videos just look terrible in every way.

Thankfully, Glove and Boots also know how terrible these videos are, and they want the plague of vertical videos on YouTube to come to an end. The two characters star in a Public Service Announcement that explains all the dangers of vertical videos. The future of video content if the problem persists is terrifying, just watch to see what we mean.

See? Nobody wants George Lucas to rerelease Star Wars yet again. Isn’t it bad enough that he’s releasing a new 3D version of each movie every year for the next five years? If we don’t stop shooting vertical videos we might have to live with knowing that we could have prevented another rerelease of Star Wars.

So please, if you ever see a friend shooting a video with their phone held vertically, kindly remind them to turn it 90 degrees. Or, if you shoot videos on your phone, remind yourself that the volume buttons should either be on top or bottom not left or right. With your help maybe we can restore video content to its rightful orientation: horizontal.

3 Comments

3 Comments

  1. adasd

    06/09/2012 at 12:15 pm

  2. bert

    11/14/2012 at 6:29 am

    What a bullshit. Vertical displays are the now. With all iPhones, iPads, Kindle’s etc, there are actually MORE vertical screens in the world than horizontal. Youtube & Co, please adapt to this reality. Lame video!

    • dashworth

      06/18/2015 at 1:19 pm

      ^^ Please tell me you’re joking, bert. Since when have mobile devices determined the way we view video, a format/technology completely unrelated to mobile phones until recently? The two are unrelated, regardless of the fact that you can shoot video on mobile devices. The day movie and television studios adapt vertical video as the norm is the day makers of televisions, projectors and screens, movie theaters, etc. will consider changing their format. The only “reality” is that the natural inclination is to hold your phone for shooting video in the same way you hold it for virtually everything else you do on it. The problem with that is that the accepted norm for video in the modern world is still very much horizontal. The video above is spot on – our eyes sit side-by-side in our head, so it’s natural to watch video like we look at the world around us – in a horizontal fashion. People don’t do it one purpose, but it’s still “wrong”. Take it or leave it, but I’ll enjoy my full screen viewing experience; you enjoy your lack of subject matter and huge black bars.

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