Horizontal or Vertical?

So, what’s your preferred position – horizontal or vertical?

Before you go off and write your strongly worded e-mail of complaint however – you do know we’re talking about filming stuff, right? What did you think we meant?!

OK, the way that you film things on your phone isn’t the biggest issue flying around the globe at the moment, but it is important for two reasons:

A) It’s one of the things that grind our Mike’s gears along with hayfever, James Corden, and the pedestrianisation of Norwich city centre

B) It really can have an impact on your video’s quality – frequently in a negative way

 

In this post we want to talk a little about “Horizontal or Vertical”, how the landscape (pun not intended) has changed slightly in the past few years re. this issue, and our opinion on this hot topic.

THE PAST

Back in the day, when we were all young and didn’t need to go out to the toilet twice a night every night, our opinion on this was absolute – you should film horizontally every single time.

After all, unless you’re the living embodiment of a Picasso painting, your spend your life viewing things horizontally because that’s how your eyes are aligned!

This is why TV programmes and movies are horizontal. Simple, right?

THE PRESENT

Over the last couple of years however, two words have begun to shift the conversation on this issue – “social” and “media”.

Video has become a really big deal on social media – after all, there’s been an 80% increase, year-by-year, of videos uploaded onto Instagram, and 82% of Twitter users watch video content on the platform.

Since Snapchat burst onto the scene, other social media channels such as Instagram and Facebook have made efforts to piggyback off its success – success brought about by encouraging users to post videos vertically.

Yes, there’s a sting in the tail! Now if you go to upload a video “story” on either Instagram or Facebook, you’ll notice that the default is for a vertical video, and nobody seems to mind!

The times they are a-changin!

THE FUTURE

So, what are our thoughts about this here in 2019?

Well, we still think horizontal is best, and moving forward we would still encourage you to film in this way.

The horizontal format is far superior to vertical when showing most things in daily life, and it’s easier to edit a video filmed this way too.

We do recognise that things have changed, however. So, if you’re filming something through Instagram or Facebook, and that’s where it’s going to live…well, vertical is OK we guess.

For more on this pressing issue, have a watch of the video above to hear from Mike!

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