"It makes my blood boil" - An entire generation is getting video wrong (and AI is making it worse) -

I'm an old school (Generation X) videographer who has been shooting video professionally since the late 1980s. In the early days of thick video tape and cumbersome camcorders, we shot footage to enjoy on a 4:3 television screen. Fast forward to the early 2000s, we were shooting in 16:9 aspect ratio and enjoying watching our footage on a widescreen television. Back in the day, I never would have imagined that people would ever shoot video in any orientation other than horizontal/landscape.

I now find myself in a world populated by Gen Z filmmakers who prefer to create and watch content on their smartphones. They tend to hold their phones vertically, and therefore shoot in portrait mode. It would be fine if all screens were portrait/vertical (you'll see some dedicated portrait screens in concert venues and on street advertising displays), but when it comes to cinemas, TVs, laptops, and most viewing screens and displays, the vast majority are still landscape.

I can't deny that I enjoy watching other people's portrait/portrait reels on my iPhone Instagram feed, but as a professional video maker, I hate shooting in portrait. I watch most media on a widescreen TV, or hold it in landscape orientation when watching shows and movies on my iPhone. When a portrait/portrait video clip is displayed on a landscape TV screen, it displays large black bars on either side. This “pillar boxing” is a waste of space. News programs try to make portrait clips taken from smartphones look not so good by stretching a blurred version of the portrait clip to fill the landscape background layer to fill the black bars. This crude workaround looks awful to Gen X eyes.

Humans see the world in widescreen with peripheral vision to appreciate beautiful scenery and spot approaching predators. Shooting and watching footage in landscape/landscape orientation replicates human vision. When I'm forced to shoot vertical video, I miss the “big picture”. I suffer from tunnel vision. In a vertical frame, I can see the main subject, but not in context. This makes moving footage, especially vertical, look inferior to the widescreen version of the scene. A friend of mine who went to a gig complained that while the artist's face on stage in the distance was shown in extreme close-up on a giant vertical screen, he couldn't see any of the supporting dancers because the screen was too narrow.

But I'm an “old man” and I understand that technology evolves to meet the needs of the new generation. I recently reviewed the Hohem iSteady V3 gimbal, which allows you to switch between portrait and landscape orientation with a specific gesture (two thumbs up). Since I often swing my arms around the camera, I would get annoyed when the gimbal would suddenly switch from horizontal to vertical in the middle of a shot.

Some Gen Z viewers watch movies at double speed to speed things up, which is an insult to filmmakers. I won't watch those movies. But will Gen Z filmmakers ever shoot vertical footage like they would normally? If you need to create vertical footage for social media, you're better off shooting widescreen clips and cropping them in Final Cut Pro. That way you can at least see the full scope of the original widescreen 16:9 footage.

I'm documenting my brother's journey to restore a WWII Willys Jeep. This ongoing project involves driving up to Scotland to film key events, such as the Jeep's first test drive. Naturally (for me), I shoot in HD widescreen 16:9. Sometimes I miss important events, but my nephew sends me footage he shot on his phone to include in my documentary. Because he's Gen Z, his footage is sometimes shot in portrait/vertical orientation which I can't (and won't) use in a widescreen project, which is frustrating.

Gen Z faces the problem of seeing huge “letterbox” black bars at the top and bottom when watching landscape clips on a portrait-oriented smartphone. But these motherfuckers solve this “problem” by using AI to expand the pixels of the film to fill in the black bars at the top and bottom of the footage. This completely changes the vision of the director and cinematographer and is more insulting than watching the movie at 2x speed. I'm tempted to complain again, but I decide to sit in a quiet room and watch my favorite UHD 4K movie on my widescreen TV.