Timestamps:
1:16 – Why would you shoot a vertical video, why would you not?
2:03 – Vertical Focused App
3:20 – Why shoot Horizontal?
6:50 – Good old-fashioned horizontal
Transcript:
Hey, everybody, it’s Craig Lillard here in this video I may be going to be talking to you about whether or not you should shoot your video content vertically or horizontally.
This has been a hotly contested topic since the beginning of time okay, not that long, but a little bit of time. And honestly, it’s probably not really been contested nearly as much as it should have been. So, you know, a few years ago, the ability to shoot video vertically got into our hands here as we were able to start doing that with smartphones, and somewhere along the way, somebody or some people started telling people who are creating content. You going to shoot vertical. You’re going to shoot vertical. And so, this has gotten into the psyche of many of us that there is some advantage to shooting vertical video. And I see it on Clipscribe. I see it a lot.
Should you shoot vertical or not?
I see these vertical videos come through and many times there’s really not a good reason for it. I want you to understand what is the point? Why would you shoot a vertical video? Why would you not? There was an app recently that as I understand has kind of tanked. And this app was focused on vertical television, and apparently, folks weren’t really wanting to watch vertical television. And for me, there are purposes for video, there are apps where I don’t and the real key comes down to what is your end game? Is your end game to post content primarily? Or only to an app?
Vertically Focused App
That is a vertically focused app. What are apps like that? Tik-tok is one of them. Snapchat is another one of them. And really those are the two main ones, that are specifically vertically focused there. There isn’t another type. There are other types of content on there, or there aren’t other types of content on there. It is just vertical. If you only want to post your content to those apps, that’s option one, or option two would be. If you want to create multiple versions of your content, so, you’re good with creating a vertical version of it and then creating a horizontal version of it for other apps, then you’re good there as well. And in that case, I would say, hey, create your vertical content because if you want to aim a Tik-Tok and Snapchat and that is the native format, then you’re going to do much better shooting your vertical content for those platforms and let me just throw out a third option would be, you’re targeting a lot of different apps, but with your main content, I’m going to talk to you about what I mean about that in a second. But you want to short-shoot little shorter videos or specific videos for those vertical platforms. You could do that as well.
Why shoot horizontal?
So, why would you want to shoot horizontal? Because most of the other platforms are not really vertical friendly. So, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Youtube, I mean, are four massive social networks, even Twitter really is not a vertical super vertical friendly network. And you could say, well, Craig, what about IGTV? Okay, that’s a vertical platform. Yeah, but IGTV shares that content with Instagram if you wanted to, which I think you should. And when it gets shown on Instagram gets cropped off in the feed, so, even that’s not really vertical friendly.
Let’s look at what happens here, with your content when you shoot it vertically versus when you shoot it horizontally. So I’ve got a video here that is a vertical video. It’s 1080 pixels wide by 1920 pixels high. And unless I think ahead about how I place myself okay, for example, I could get back to you, and I could duck down and I could leave room for things. There’s really no room for text, up here or down here. It’s just you, okay? And the problem with vertical is that you can’t add to it. You can’t stack upon it. All you can do is cut it down because, at the moment, 1920 pixels high is as high as it goes. Let’s look at the cropped version of that, okay? So, I can crop it. And in this case, I did an intelligent crop. Okay? I personally cropped it. I didn’t use an app. I didn’t let IGTV/Instagram crop it for me, which they’re not going to do it really intelligently. They’re just going to chop the top off, chop the bottom off, which is what? This would be okay.
So, anytime you want to take your vertical content and you want to put it on an app that’s not vertical friendly you have to either crop it or you have to shrink it down and then put you know, they put the blurred blur behind it, and you’re just it’s wasted space. Really? Okay, you’re losing effect. You’re losing content. So, what if you want to go all the way down to youtube? Youtube is still not really friendly yet. To vertical content. It’s getting there, but it’s really made for horizontal. So again, you know, in this example, you see a crop crop crop take-off more of my content. I have no room for text, no room for headlines, no room for subtitles.
So, that’s what happens when you start vertical and then you want to start putting your content on these other platforms. And for me, the whole purpose of Clipscribe is to add things that get attention. 80% of, you know, social media content. Watch without the sound on. If you don’t have text on there, you’re missing out on that attention.
Good old-fashioned Horizontal
So, let’s flip it around, and let’s say you start out good old-fashioned horizontal. You hold your camera like this, you shoot in the way that all cameras shoot all video cameras shoot. The only video camera that shoots vertical is your phone. All the other video cameras shoot horizontally. This is the norm everywhere. In the world of video, horizontal is the norm, and it’s still the norm on the internet. Okay, just because you can shoot vertical doesn’t mean horizontal is not the norm. And the most painful thing for anybody that knows anything about video is to see somebody shooting vertically when they should have been shooting horizontally when they see a video on youtube that’s vertical when they see somebody on zoom and it’s vertical and zoom isn’t made for that. So, you just have the black bars on the side and you’re wasting valuable space.
So, if you start shooting horizontally now, what you could do well, this video right here is set up already for Youtube. Okay, it’s also set up for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, they’re all horizontal video-friendly, and it’s also set up for even IGTV horizontal video-friendly. You can put a horizontal video anywhere you want to, but here is the video of it.
I want a square video
Okay, say I want a square video. I want to use that square space available to me on Facebook, on Linkedin I can stack bars on the top and the bottom and not lose any of my original content. I’m not having to crop it. And I have a room now to add a headline to add subtitles and to add other items to it. And then you say, well, what if I want to go vertical? What if I want to put it on IGTV, Tik-tok, Snapchat.
Now, you have all that space above and below you can add emojis, headlines, subtitles and if you format it exactly like what you see here, you can upload this to IGTV. And when they crop it because they’re going to chop this part off and they’re going to chop this part off, okay, it’s still going to look fine. Okay, so, you can put on IGTV and share it over to Instagram, which allows you to post longer content on Instagram because Instagram has time limits, that IGTV doesn’t, and this is how you can also get around that so, you could take that one horizontal video put it on multiple social networks, adding value to all those videos by adding more attention-getting factors to them without having to shoot. Multiple videos, which you know, while that’s a great strategy. And I do think it is a good strategy. It’s just not a strategy that most people have time to do. If they’re just a small business, you don’t have time to be shooting all this content as some super content creators do. And so this is the best way to get the maximum results out of your content. And then, if you wanna make some short videos for Tik-Tok, Snapchat you could do that as well. You can do that in addition to this strategy.
So, let me know what you think. Do you think I’m crazy? Do you think I’m wrong? Do you think vertical is the way to go definitely prove me wrong in the comments. Or let’s talk about it and discuss another than that. If you like this video follow. Subscribe. Like, if you want to check out Clipscribe I’ve got a link down below and you can check that out. Makes it super easy to make content. You know, just like this here.
And, hopefully, you’ll enjoy checking that out. This is Craig Lillard, everybody thanks for watching, and I’ll see you on another video.
