Podcast #1124: Vertical Framing Movies and TV

HDTV and Home Theater Podcast

On this week’s show Vertical Framing of content is becoming a big thing now. Will this affect how movies and TV are shot? A listener talks about how he solved his parent’s remote control problem. We also read your emails, and we had a bunch of good ones. We also take a look at the week’s news.

News:

• Disney Expects to Pay Comcast at Least $8.6 Billion to Buy Out Hulu Stake
• NFL Sunday Ticket price on YouTube TV gets a 50% cut through the rest of the season
• Roku Reports Solid Growth in Q3
• Walmart+ Comes With Free Paramount+, 10 Cents Off Gas, & More For Just $4.16 a Month if You Pay Annually During Its Black Friday Sale

Other:

• Are Dodgers Games On Spectrum SportsNet+ Streaming?
• Disney's ESPN Challenge: Keeping a Cash Cow From Keeling Over

Vertical Framing of content

What is Vertical Content?

Vertical content is a media type consumed vertically on the screen. It is unlike horizontal content that is seen on desktop computers and television.

This content type is a natural progression that stems from the growing popularity of mobile devices. Because more people are using smartphones, which generally have a vertical orientation, they are now browsing content online using the default vertical orientation of mobile devices.

Just for Social?

Producers understand that some of what is being shot will end up on social media in the form of advertisements. But simply cropping a movie will not yield quality results. Instead, shots are being redone on set with social in mind. To the point where special brackets are made to accommodate flipping a camera on it's side. Right now this is limited to advertisements but what happens if they shoot entire features this way?

Dual Framing

Someone who’s become particularly used to dealing with it is Anna Gudbrands, a London-based cinematographer whose work includes short-form pieces for Relentless, Wonderbra and Zegna’s campaign with Jose Mourinho. Gudbrands’ recent projects have, she says, heavily involved dual framing.

“I've been doing a lot of fashion and skincare in the summer... almost every single job I do now, they want an option for 9:16 which is Instagram, but they want the hero to be 16:9. It’s a situation that inevitably involves compromise.

Should Studios Start Using Dual Framing in Feature Films?

Remote option

An Idea from a listener Rob

Listening to this week's show and the discussion for a remote that’s easy to use, I will mention another option. The Echo Cube, I have it set up for my parents and they love it. They can tell the TV to turn on or off, the Ring doorbell shows up in the corner if someone’s at the door, and now after switching to YouTube TV fully they can just tell it to “----tune to ABC'' and it works, with DirecTV it wouldn’t always respond correctly to changing channels via voice. I have also upgraded to the premium Echo remote with the 2 programmable buttons along with the 4 standard ones. Now they have quick buttons to the services they use the most, YTTV (button 1), Peacock (button 2) and the ones for Prime, Netflix etc. The other great thing about this option for them is they can just say “Echo watch the Thursday Night game” and it switches over. (I have changed the Cube’s name from Alexa to Echo to keep the Kitchen Echo from responding).

Honestly the hardest part for them was getting out of the habit of channel numbers and going with channel names-they were so used to “Tune to Channel 7” instead of “tune to ABC'' etc. But now that they have gotten the hang of it they really like it, my Mom has no issue changing to Peacock to watch Days of Our Lives and then changing back to traditional TV. One other note on the remote, if you use the upgraded remote with YTTV you can change channels up/down like linear TV and if you change around your guide to be those you watch most of the time it actually is a nice option.

I am personally using an Apple TV that can offer some of these same things, but YTTV hasn’t enabled channel changing via a Home Pod so at this point I’d say the Echo beats the Apple TV if you mostly watch traditional TV.