03/11/2025
To shoot in landscape or portrait? 🎥 📺 📱
It’s a question that everyone in the world of video production has to consider when planning their content shoots.
There is no escaping that in all video marketing campaigns that include a social element (which let’s face it, is most of them), portrait video is necessary.
There are two options here.
1. Film everything in landscape, wide enough that cropped-in portrait edits can be lifted from the footage.
2. Physically flip the camera around and film in portrait. This removes the option of any landscape edits, however, gives the opportunity for higher quality footage to be captured in portrait.
The temptation is to always run with option 1. If feels like a no-brainer as you are getting the best of both worlds.
Which is very true, it does allow content to be repurposed in many different ways.
However, portrait edits that have been cropped from footage shot in a 16:9 aspect ratio will never be as good a quality as what can be captured by in-camera portrait footage.
Although the best of both worlds approach is very useful in many instances, especially when all the different apsect ratio edits are required.
If you definitely don’t need a landscape edit, don’t film in landscape. Especially if your video marketing campaign is focused on TikTok and/or Instagram.
It opens the door for higher quality footage to be captured and could in turn enhance your video content beyond what you were previously able to capture.
As always, it comes down to planning. Considering what is needed from your video content before you start filming will help to optimise the way it is filmed.
Does anyone else have any thoughts on this?
