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Comment by metadat | Hacker News Reader

Direct link to the actual video (TFA "Play Button" image wasn't clickable for for me).

That's actually a slightly different video from the one in the article, which is https://www.facebook.com/1288518484/videos/465839182979896/

this one shows the explosion as well!

Thanks for pointing this out, else I might not have seen it! Really cool.

You can actually see the person filming the FB video you posted in the YouTube video!

Now let's synthesize a Gaussian splat reproduction!

warning for the annoying screaming you're about to endure. there's not much sound for the geyser so you may as well just mute.

It saddens me that we've normalized the recording of vertical videos. There'll be so many more historical events caught on video... but it's now so much more likely that it'll be a vertical video. :(

To be fair, the vertical recording here fits the context. Also, the fact that the recorder held the camera steady and kept the content within the frame is great by itself. A lot of times, you end up with shaky, useless footage.

> To be fair, the vertical recording here fits the context.

Briefly, near the beginning. But not for the rest of the video.

If you're watching a video on a phone, it's trivial to rotate the phone 90 degrees. On a TV or computer, not so much, so you end up with a ridiculous amount of wasted screen real estate and objectively inferior image resolution.

The primary modality through which most people experience media today is their phones, so vertical video is just fine.

Vertical video is never fine.

Isn't this a technological choice though? Cameras are sufficiently advanced nowadays so it's possible to take horizontal video while keeping the phone vertical, so it's just a software feature away (at the expense of horizontal resolution), or hw feature away (at the expense of a device internal gimbal)

You’d need square sensors, not an internal moving gimbal, so manufacturers would be left with a choice: should the square fit the circle or the circle fit the square? The first would lower quality and the second would increase costs and add wasted pixels (vignette).

Aren't all sensors square already (well 4:3, or 3:2) , and fitting the circle ?

No, 4:3 is not a square.

I found a discussion on the topic here[*]. The consensus seems to be that “wasted” sensor area outside the circle would not be marketable.

https://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/109452/is-there-an...

It's not a technological choice, at least not at the level of camera design. It's trivial to record videos the right way; people just can't be arsed.

Suppose you implement horizontal recording while the phone is vertical; this would mean the video preview is now scaled and takes only a fraction of the screen (the same way watching horizontal video on YouTube while in "portrait mode"), which people would find annoying.

Alternatively, you could not scale the video; now the video preview displays only a vertical slice of the frame. It looks OK, but people would soon discover the actual video a screen's worth of image on each side of the preview, leading to anxiety and worry - people would have pay extra attention to not capture things that weren't intended to be on the video; they'd soon look for a way to turn this off.

The unfortunate reality is, it's a social problem partially caused by a technological one. Vertical videos are driven by the phone form-factor and because portraits and selfies actually need to be vertical, and people being people, shooting photos of themselves and other is what they care about the most.

So this comment and the sibling mentioning square sensors raise some good points. Let me rephrase the technological challenge: Make all phone screens square. All phones are now squares. Use Generative AI to fill in the sides of non-square screens. Problem solved. I think I need to make this an AI photo startup.

For amateur footage it's absolutely fine, especially in this instance where it's actually a benefit. Nobodys advocating for vertical movies or tv shows.

There's far better things to focus false internet collective outrage at.

Vertical video is perfectly fine if the device on which it is played back on has a vertical screen. Never is very out of place here.

And that's the vast majority of devices that are used to watch videos. "Vertical video is never fine" stems from the good old days of PCs with monitors. In these phone days, according to the same logic, horizontal video is never fine.

But the phone can easily be rotated to landscape, so landscape has wider compatability.

If, and only if, the application supports it. Frustratingly, not all do, so you're stuck with the biggest black bars framing a microscopic landscape video.

Contrast with a monitor, where it will at least be viewable vertically, even if it too only fills a portion of the monitor horizontally.

For something you want to capture immediately, the amount of time it takes for the phone's accelerometer to decide you have rotated it is already too long.

Vertical video and picture is fine when the thing you're capturing is vertical, eg a person or something shooting into the air

Rotating a phone 90 degrees is trivial and takes a fraction of a second. Rotating a computer monitor 90 degrees is a pain at the best of times. Rotating a laptop 90 degrees makes it unusable. Rotating a television 90 degrees probably requires a toolkit and an assistant. Which of these adaptations seems more reasonable?

For people who don’t use computers and TVs much, no adaptation probably makes the most sense. There’s a surprising amount of people out there who are mostly just on their phones nowadays, plus I’m pretty much sure large platforms like TikTok and YouTube Shorts and such also pander to that format.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the majority of views also come from people viewing vertical screens, so it kind of makes sense? I personally have started to prefer the vertical format for certain kinds of videos, especially when viewing them on my phone… so I’ve also started taking more vertical videos with my phone.

Phones can easily be oriented either way, unlike most laptop and workstation screens.

Majority of views certainly come from people whose eyes are horizontally next to each other and therefore whose field of view has a greater extent in the horizontal rather than vertical direction.

Admittedly I don't understand where the vertical recording fad comes from. Personally I take pictures and photos that are almost exclusively horizontal except in rare cases like taking a picture of a very tall building.

Or… a geyser? Kinda the one thing absolutely known for going up and down.

I assume that the vertical recording fad primarily comes from:

1. the people doing the recording being too lazy to rotate their phones, and/or the people doing the recording catering to the lowest common denominator of expecting viewers to be too lazy to rotate their phones;

2. so many "influencer" and related videos these days consisting solely of the narrator's face being right in front of the camera, which makes for vertical being the optimal orientation, due to the human face being taller than it is wide (hence the term "portrait orientation"!).

I also hate it, and I also still shoot almost all my photos and videos in horizontal / landscape orientation. I guess that makes me old.

IMO, it's also because vertical orientation is effectively the default on a phone.

Nobody expects to have to turn their video camera sideways to capture in the "correct" orientation... but you must on a phone.

Well, I used to want to do photos/videos in landscape mode. Until I learnt the hard way that orientation detection is not very reliable on (at least the older) iPhones. Had my share of "come on, turn 90 degrees you useless thing" moments, until I gave up completely on wanting to reorient my phone. Since then, it has stayed in portray mode forever.

Watching videos on phones, which "natively" have a vertical orientation, is pretty popular. I expect the majority of videos watched this way.

For social media, vertical pictures and videos is preferred. Instagram adds some borders around your media if it's in landscape mode, same with TikTok, so the idea is to use vertical recording to not have added black bars around your media.

When you're taking a self-portrait it's easier to hold a phone vertically one-handed, your self image fits the screen better, and your followers are going to view it in portrait mode on TikTok anyway.

When you go yo take a selfie of something other than your face, you just keep the habit.

I can't easily re-orient my phone when I'm laying (my main use circumstance) because then I have to hold it above my stomach awkwardly. Gets worse when it's charging. Can't put it because I'm fat enough for screen to "dive" and become obstructed. Vertical mode has no such issue.

When I'm sitting, holding vertical feels natural, holding horizontal feels awkward again. I can put my hand on a lap and basically rest in vertical. High risk of dropping it in horizontal (and while rotating). Same for walking.

I don't really see how you can do it "easily" apart from purely geometric considerations. I can rotate my PC display more easily cause it's arm-mounted (which is one of the PC life changers).

where the vertical recording fad comes from

Most popular content today is "person focus". People are vertical.

To be fair, a geyser is one of the better situations to film in vertical.

aren't our eyes spherical?

Yes this is true, but we tend to favor horizontal information over height. Thus our eyes are horizontal. A decent rational would be because that would favor our survival since most things are pinned to this plane via gravity.

Yes, but there are two of them, and they're to the left and right of each other, not above and below each other.

The subject is in a vertical orientation, so it is perfect and desirable that the original video has all its resolution dedicated to capturing the phenomenon in the best quality possible. A horizontal video would mean that there are less pixels on the subject matter.

Even worse this video appears to have been padded to 16:9 so I can't fullscreen it properly on my phone on YouTube web or app.

Can't you pinch in? Double tap? Something like that should work, afair.

it's really sad that videos are recorded in the exact format that fits the medium used to read them :(

PSA: Vertical Video Syndrome

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

What a weird thing to care about

It's a redditism

I mean, the action was happen vertically.

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