this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
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Mildly Interesting
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Fantastic video, but it winds me up when they add padding to a phone video to make it landscape, as if no one in existence might possibly be viewing their phone-generated content on a phone.
Yeah adding padding is always harmful. If the aspect ratio doesn't match it's not like the video breaks so just let the player deal with it. Anyone who has a problem with vertical videos isn't going to be any happier that you added bars to it. Who is this solution for?
It's because the content was likely preprocessed for broadcast news. Which means normal 16:9 landscape format.
Vertical video has done nothing but introduce constant issues. I used to be a guide for Jeep runs, and I was also the video editor for the run videos (just clips from the run with music). And naturally you can't be everywhere, so 95% of the clips have to be recorded by everyone else. Even though they were told "don't record vertical video because we can't use it" they did so anyways, and were upset when we couldn't use their videos.
And to be clear, this isn't just a random video. We're talking about a large organized and legally registered club, so we kept everything to a certain standard of quality. Vertical videos are not suitable for anything except a phone.
Why can't you use it? Because your web designer isn't designing for the possibility that people use a phone to access the Web, but it's not 2004 any more and they're living in the past.
You showed your colours when you assumed that portrait video is of lower quality. It's only of lower quality if you've padded it out and are watching it on a landscape screen!
Technology to detect whether your webpage is being viewed landscape has existed for a long time, and takes very simple calculations indeed or just a splash or two of css to maximise the video size for whatever screen it's being viewed on. It's design laziness and wasted bandwidth to put the silly blurry bars or even black bars down the side of the video. But don't force landscape on everyone. Smart phones aren't new and they aren't going away.
I suspect that the majority of people who spend even a tiny bit more than half of their recreational screen time looking at a fixed landscape screen are well over thirty.
Because TVs are landscape. These videos are shown at club events.
I never said it's lower quality. Not once.
No one said anything about websites.
No? This you?
Totally not lower quality. Definitely not. There's a full stop and everything. No link whatsoever. My bad.
Well I think the rest of us are discussing a video on bbc.co.uk, which is a website, and we're doing it on lemmy.world, which is also a website, and when I complained about people making portrait videos landscape, I suspect most people correctly figured out that I meant on websites, so I really think it's just you that assumes we're talking about jeep club.
It's such a shitty experience if content can only be consumed on certain platforms, which is what it sounds like you're proposing.
Watching portrait footage on a TV sucks, dude.
But the fuzzy bars on the side make it great?!?
Watching portrait footage that's been padded out to landscape on a portrait device is even worse!
I'm proposing that the web designer writes a responsive webpage when they are sent a portrait video to include, so that if it's viewed on a portrait device it fills the width, and when it's viewed on a landscape device it fills the height. If it's actually for telly, there's usually no harm in cropping a bit at the top and bottom and at that point, feel free to put whatever you like down the sides, but there's no need to throw away the portrait original for the portrait view of the website.
Like I already said, the technology for writing a webpage that looks different depending on the orientation of the device being used to view it is neither complicated nor new. There's no need to treat every medium the same in 2023.
And yet most videos on websites are still proper horizontal. You can maximize and turn your phone. Everyone wins.
Yes, and that's great, it really is, but when the footage you have is portrait, don't pad it out to force landscape orientation on it irrespective of the orientation of the viewer's screen, just let portrait content be full size portrait when viewed on a portrait screen. That is the beginning, the middle and the end of my point. It's all I'm asking for.
Or just don't film in portrait.
And when anyone films in portrait, make sure to punish anyone trying to watch the footage with a similarly criminal portrait orientation, by putting borders round the side of the portrait content to force it to be landscape, thus shrinking the content to roughly a ninth of their screen, unless they switch to the blessed landscape orientation when it will fill a glorious third of the screen. Let no one watch it full size for the creator thereof has sinned against the gods of landscape.
This is the right and proper punishment for content creators who break the landscape law: let no one see this video fullscreen, for they have sinned against landscape. https://ibb.co/x2MQQG2 let the borders of landscape wrath descend and pad, and let fullscreen be disabled for all, for if landscape viewers are denied fullscreen EVERYONE MUST SUFFER.
Oh, or you could just skip the fuzzy bars in portrait mode if you're feeling more accommodating to phone users.
Or just film in landscape and everyone wins.
Alright, you win, I'll never use my phone in portrait ever again, especially not to film my dog in a storm. I'll make sure I turn that baby right to your preferred orientation and I'll stop complaining about pointless bars at the side of other people's portrait content.
If you want, I can go back through my canara roll and delete everything that's in portrait just in case I'm ever tempted to sell it to a news organisation. I'll make sure to only ever post landscape content to whatsapp, signal and especially tiktok and instagram, because otherwise some relative, friend or random Internet user might share it in portrait.
You're right. That's definitely a better solution than not putting annoying fuzzy bars on portrait content.
Glad you've seen the light. Go in peace.
Someone note this moment in history. The war has finally been won