(This is my twenty-eighth post in a series of entries I’m using to participate in Blaugust for 2026.)
I recently watched a YouTube video by Mark Urban where he complains about aspect ratios.
Reading that previous sentence usually has me thinking it’s going to be a rant about which format is preferred over the other. (I’m a horizontal video person myself, but that’s mainly because that’s what I watch.) This video doesn’t do that. Instead, it addresses concerns that I, as someone who doesn’t freelance, usually never has to consider.
As is my trend, I won’t be summarizing the video here. It’s worth watching, even if the best possible solution (paying for two photographers so you get both shots) is sadly impractical.
Or is it?
I teach students to make video. For the past two years, we’ve partnered with an organization outside the school to do client work for them. If I have more than one student collecting b-roll and a-roll, it’s trivial to have one record horizontally while the other records vertically.
This could lead to some interesting discussions about what to do with the shots, who the target audiences are, and how the aspect ratio affects the compositions.
And also there’s going to be that student that takes the vertical video and edits it so it’s in a horizontal aspect ratio but not cropped, so there’s large black boxes on either side. That’s a whole other discussion.