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Comment by tamimio | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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