Vertical Videos – Why and How?

If you’ve been involved with video production for a while now, you’re used to creating horizontal videos. Theaters, televisions, monitors and computer screens are all laid out horizontally. As a result, horizontal or landscape format has long been a requirement.

Social media, however, has disrupted this simple rule. Vertical or portrait-style videos are gaining popularity on mobile-centric platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok where users view content primarily on their smartphones. A less-extreme option, usable for both mobile and desktop platforms, is square videos.

When deciding on a video format, it is now critical to consider the subject and purpose of your content. Is it more important to see a wider scope of the scene? Or does it make more sense to focus on a subject in the foreground? Do you intend to add graphics, text or photo inserts over the footage which will require extra room? Who is your target audience and how will they will likely view it?

Professional video is expensive. So an additional concern is making your video assets as flexible, reusable and future-proof as possible. As a result, we now often format trailers and shorter videos in both horizontal and square formats. Most of our projects don’t end up exclusively on social media, so we’ve never worked on a project which is exclusively vertical.

Getting Vertical Video Experience

Recently we responded to an RFP that wanted the primary versions of their videos in horizontal and vertical formats. We were confident knew we could do this, but had no demo material. So, when WIFV (Women in Film DC) posted a filmmaker challenge centered around Barbie, we decided to use it as an opportunity to gain experience with vertical videos. Below are the results.

Horizontal version

Vertical version

Background on video size & layout

To understand why we were confident we could create vertical and horizontal videos from the same footage, it’s helpful to understand video formats. All our equipment records in at least 4K. 4K video is twice as wide and twice as high as HD video, so one 4K screen holds 4 HD screens. There is enough room in a 4K video shot for one vertical HD video shot. The diagram below shows the 4 HD screens in different colors and the one vertical shot as gray.

My plan was to choose the vertical shot from the 4K horizontal shots, moving each shot horizontally to show the best portion of the frame to show to tell the story.  In general, everything worked pretty much as planned.

What we learned from this vertical video exercise

Vertical offers a lot of opportunity for panning across the frame where there is movement.  It also offers options to cut one shot in half and show different sections of the frame as different cuts in the edited video.  I did both of these a number of times during the edit.  I was glad that the vertical framing during production was generally good, because there was little flexibility to adjust that during the edit.

Reformatting the opening and the credits required the most work.  Since these were custom-created, they offered a lot more opportunity for  tweaking for the vertical version.  I didn’t think the credits would be that much work, but it turns out vertical HD feels really tall and thin, and the credits were hard to fit.

Somewhat surprisingly, close-ups tended to be easier to use than wide shots.  

If I could change anything about how we did the production, I think I would have the close-up camera do a vertical establishing shot at the beginning of each scene so we would have that available for the edit.  This could be done during the first take when everyone is still working out their lines because it wouldn’t be used for audio, just for perspective.

Conclusion

Creating both horizontal, square and vertical videos from the same source material is likely to increase in importance. Professional video is too expensive and resource-intensive not to make it as widely usable as possible. This challenge is not too difficult as long as you film in a format that has as many vertical pixels as is needed for the finished vertical video. 4K video cameras do a great job of generating video that can be used to create vertical HD productions.