Horizon – Record horizontally. Always
horizon.camera
horizon.camera
It seems to me that it would be helpful if such idea is applied on the system level without the need for an app.
And even if you do hold it horizontally, you won't manage to shoot a perfectly aligned shot easily by yourself. For example, if you try to get a shot of a sunset.
I'm baffled as to why iPhone/Android doesn't offer a feature that allows you to toggle horizontal video from a vertical phone. I feel like that'd make 50% of smartphone videos infinitely more watchable.
Compare those professional "unsteady cam" shots where there's lots of horizontal & vertical movement, but never any tilt.
I think lot of hate against vertical videos comes from the the way that youtube displays them.
I tried to create browser extension that displays vertical videos without the horizontal frame but I couldn't figure out how to determine orginal dimensions of the clip.
Vertical format was picked so that two people talking fit the frame. Today we more often see one person talk while being accompanied by non-video content (related, comments, slides, code). When single person talks (s)he's small and often accompanied by useless background on both sides, regardless of whether the video was recorded vertically or not.
I think that youtube went embrace (allow to upload), extend (by useless horizontal frame that makes the video smaller), extinguish (by the hands of all the people enraged by vertical videos due to previous stuff and the fact that people often use fullscreen on non-pivoting monitors).
https://mediacru.sh/H4GxJXvnUosd
It's open source: https://github.com/MediaCrush/MediaCrush
At least the constant zooming could be easily lessened by defining a safe area of the frame as the active content while using the remaining sensor area for compensation only.
You do have the option of turning off rotate-to-zoom and stick with the prior low-res stabilized image.
In the meantime, you can switch between modes while recording depending on the situation. Finally, locked mode switches automatically to horizontal or vertical orientation in version 2.0.
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up to |-----→ more than?Would the camera have to physically rotate or is it software and iOS/android just don't give devs access to it?
Alternatively, if we had a completely square sensor... though that still wouldn't help if you rotate at less than 90 degree angles.
Horizon, processes the video input using the same tools that the default app uses to process video.
https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=horizon+camera+app
They do show up in site search, though:
Here are 6 promo codes for you so you can get Horizon for free!
Anyway, what I wanted to ask.. how do they go around the loss of quality? It's not a simple crop? Can they somehow utilize any part of the chip they want (as long as the maximum is the same?) since the chip is much bigger than the max possible video it can record?
Who says they do? The app seems to show the entire input so I don't think there could be anything tricky in terms of using only part of the sensor.
They advertise certain resolution. I assumed it's for the final video. If they just crop it and stretch it.. that's disappointing.
This is an obvious idea that everyone has been craving for, and I don't think such ideas deserve patents. If stock cameras adopt this idea, tough luck, they'll just have to compete like everyone else and add more differentiation.
It's not the implementation that matters here, it's the idea. And companies can do their own implementations of it. They don't have to license it.
And my first assumption was that they do something more than cropping, in other words that the implementation is not trivial. But I learned that might not be the case.
Since the app seems to seamlessly adjust the picture so it doesn't rotate when you change the actual smartphone's physical orientation, what's the point of rotating the phone mid-shot?
Take the example of the two women sitting for coffee... why does the camera-person bother rotating the phone to horizontal in the middle of the shot? Why not just stay in place?
I can't think of any time when that isn't what I want.
Area of vision man. It is not wasted space to see a horizontal plane, as that is what we expect to see when looking at anything. Vertical video simulates the effect of straining to see through a partly closed door it is tangibly horrible.
Horizontal video simulates the effect of straining to see through a partly closed Venetian blinds it is tangibly horrible.
Now, is this any more correct? Or is it an equally arbitrary personal opinion?
The move to "wide" screen was also the move to short screen. I don't find anything natural about it; I expect to be able to move my eyes up and down as well as left and right.
A preference for short and wide screens seems more cultural than natural. Even granting that humans have better peripheral visions along the sides than top and bottom the current screens fall short in capturing this range.
My beef with most vertical videos is that people typically do not make good use of the format; there's nothing intrinsically bad or wrong about it.
In another comment you said that 4:3 is a reasonable approximation of normal human visual field. 19:9 screens don't map to this; this restricted height works well for consuming certain current entertainment offerings but I don't see that a preference for it is objective.
If area of vision were guiding screen design we would likely see more of what the current Surface 3 offers.
Vertical-format video has the opposite effect: you might call it anti-immersive. It boxes the subject up in an intrusive frame and makes you feel like you're looking through a hallway or some other obstruction.
Though, i think i'd prefer this style app if it just picked portrait or landscape, and adjusted between just those two states dynamically. That would be nice if you accidentally shoot in one, and decided you wanted the other. Which happens quite frequently for me.
This is a demo from youtube. Looks even more shaky than the default camera app.
Suddenly vertical videos are zoomed in and create ugly compilations :(
When I had old Nokia phone I didn't have to rotate phone to take horizontal photos.
For those wondering, it's not free. It used to be $1, now it's $2.
The TechCrunch post you are linking to was posted back on our initial launch at January 14th. This video was shot with the first version of Horizon that didn't feature any stabilization. Moreover, our straightening algorithm has improved a lot since back then (6 months ago). Plus we are always working on updates to improve it even further!
Concerning the price, Horizon was always $1.99 but had a -50% off launch sale in the first month of its release.
The 2.0 update is a free update for all our of existing users!