The Best Way to Shoot Vertical Videos... is to not shoot vertical

When it comes to social media content, a lot of people gravitate towards shooting on a phone or shooting on a pocket camera. Well, that works well for a lot of content creators and also social media managers. But when I'm hired as a filmmaker to capture live resort events and membership club experiences, I am trying to figure out how to deliver nine by 16 video for my clients. Every client wants them. It's just inescapable these days. So today I wanna share with you my approach and my workflow and some of my mindset when it comes to shooting vertical videos on a cinema camera. Now with vertical video, there are two main school of thoughts. The first one is to capture vertical video natively. So what you'll do is you'll flip that camera and turn it sideways, and then your sensor will now be in a vertical format. Some of the benefits of doing this is that you deliver exactly what you see. So that way your framing is very accurate. And because you're turning it sideways, you're maximizing that vertical resolution, using up the whole sensor all the way through. You don't have to worry about cropping anything in post. However, some of the downsides that I've found shooting vertical only is that my workflow gets a little bit weird. When I'm done editing in Premiere Pro and I'm exporting the XML out to Resolve, the rotated clips from Premiere don't translate into Resolve at all. So I'm looking at a sideways 16 by nine, but it's a vertical video. So I literally have to turn my head sideways like this every single time in order to see what I am color grading. And that obviously will slow down my process just a little bit. It's a little bit more inconvenient. And the other major, major downside that I don't like about shooting vertical natively is that when the client wants the 16 by nine version, because they always will, you are locked into that vertical aspect ratio. Cropping out a horizontal frame from a vertical video doesn't look that good. And that's where the second option comes into play. And this is the one that I use exclusively. And that is to shoot horizontal and then crop into the vertical after. The major benefit to this is that I am future-proofing the project. I know for a fact, whether the client realizes it or not, that at some point down the road, they're going to come back and turn around and say, hey, do we have a 16 by nine, a horizontal, can we cut some sort of like horizontal widescreen version of this vertical video that you shot of this event from like three months ago? So when I shoot horizontal natively, that means I have that 16 by nine footage that I can use to re-edit later on. And when I'm editing, it gives me a lot of flexibility. One wide shot can turn into three different vertical shots if I just cut out the left edge, the middle section, and also the right edge because of different moments around the frame. Now, if it's so good, why doesn't everyone shoot horizontal and crop vertical? One of the main things and drawbacks is composition takes a big hit. Sometimes your options are very limited when it comes to framing a shot. I often find myself center framing a lot of things. While I mentioned that you have the flexibility of using the different edges of the frame, sometimes there's just not anything going on on the edges of the frame and you're just locked into that vertical middle frame shot. For me, because I shoot a lot of live events for hotel resorts and membership club experiences, it's important that I have that flexibility of the horizontal video versus being locked in to that vertical only framing. When I shoot horizontal and deliver vertical, my main priority is gonna be that vertical frame. That horizontal frame is definitely gonna be secondary because my clients are gonna post it on Instagram Reels and also TikTok. But there are a few things that I do to work around these compositional issues and still make the vertical and horizontal frames look good or at least look decent. I don't know about looking good, but just at least decent, somewhat passable. The first thing that I do, frame guides. Frame guides are something that gives me a visual indication of what am I gonna lose when I eventually crop into that vertical frame. The Canon C70 also gives you options to use a mask overlay that kind of darkens the sides of the frame so that you can kind of see exactly what you're shooting and you don't have to pay attention too much to the edges of the frame. This is really helpful. So you can really focus in and dial in on that nine by 16 center frame. I like to keep mine on the 25% so that I can kind of block out the sides and really pay attention to what I'm seeing in front. Now, if you're using a camera that doesn't have the frame guides, I would just recommend turning on the rule thirds grid thing and just keeping everything centered in that middle third. Number two, use wider lenses. I used to use the 24 to 70, but I switched over to the 16 to 35 when I found that the 24 to 70 kind of felt a little bit too tight. You kind of don't notice that it's too tight, especially when you're monitoring something on a small little LCD screen on the back of your camera, or sometimes even if you have a monitor on the top of your camera, it still is a little bit deceptive of how close you actually are to the subject. Forcing myself to use wider focal lengths really helped me zoom out and it makes my vertical frame look a lot better when I'm editing. And also captures a lot more of the environment naturally because it's just a wider lens. And that works really well for social media content. However, one of the issues that you'll naturally run into is that, man, it just looks way too wide sometimes, especially when you are looking at the whole horizontal frame, you start getting these like weird distortions on the edges of the frame. And because of that, I try to not shoot anywhere past 20 millimeters. Any wider than that, it just starts looking a little bit wonky. However, obviously if you are tight on space, like I'm tight on spaces sometimes because it's a small room, lots of kids running around, you just need to have that 60 millimeter, you need to just use it to capture that vertical frame. When I'm using a wider lens, I try to fill up as much of the frame as possible. So I'll have my center frame, things happening in the middle of the frame. In addition to that, I will also try to have things going on on the edge, this edge of the frame, and also this edge of the frame, like people talking here, people laughing over here, maybe people eating over here. And then like in the middle, you see the kids playing around. Number three, use composition that works well for both vertical and also horizontal video. There is a mindset shift when it comes to shooting for both vertical and horizontal. In narrative filmmaking, you're really just focusing a lot on like composition, making sure that horizontal frame looks really good. But for social media delivery, I am not gonna be worrying too much about having every single shot perfectly composed. Sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do to get the shot. And neither is the client dissecting the whole shot. They just want strong usable moments. However, that doesn't mean that you just throw everything out the window. There are certain things that you can do to actually make your shots look better. And here are a couple of ways that I think about composition. Number one, favor center compositions. Center framing becomes a natural habit when you're shooting horizontal delivery vertical. For events, that's actually okay. Again, you're not really gonna be thinking about composition 24-7. You're really paying attention to capturing the moment, right? You're capturing shots that you can use to help the client sell whatever event that they're putting on. But for certain moments that are repeatable, I know that I'll be able to get it multiple times. I would shoot things differently. For example, I'll sometimes intentionally push the action of the shot towards the left side of the frame or towards the right side of the frame so that I can kind of get some more of some sort of like rule of thirds going on so that when I edit the horizontal video, it actually looks halfway decent. You know, there's at least some thought that went into the composition. Because a lot of my shots are gonna be center framed, you might think that it can be stale. It can be kind of repetitive and a little bit boring. But a way that I like to get around that is to actively look for vertical and horizontal leading lines that cross the middle of the frame. These type of compositions already obviously work really well in the widescreen format. But when you crop into that vertical video, it really just helps you fill up and fill out that vertical frame, making it look more dynamic and more immersive. Some things that I'm looking for are gonna be like tables, right? You can shoot a table horizontally or vertically. Rows of chairs, rows of people, a line of people. Shooting through objects, you're creating things like a frame within a frame so that when you crop into the vertical, it kind of looks cool. And then when you also expand it out to the horizontal, it looks pretty good, not bad. Having things in the foreground of your shots, whether that's vertical or horizontal, also works great. When you crop into that vertical video, any sort of like minor foreground element really gets like blown up. It makes that foreground element a lot bigger than what you see on your frame when you're shooting in the camera. One simple trick that I like to do to create my own foreground element is before I shoot, I'll wait for like people to see if they walk by. And if I know someone's gonna be walking by, like they're like five seconds away from walking through my frame, I'll start my movement. So if they're walking this way, I will shoot this way so that the action goes kind of like this, like that. So it kind of like crosses like that. I don't know, I like that because it's a little bit more fun. It looks a little bit cooler. That way, if that person is holding or using something that's particular to that event, or they're just simply holding a plate of food and they're walking through it, that just kind of adds another layer of element to the whole event to showcase what the event is all about. And these are things that I incorporate into my workflow, especially shooting on a cinema camera, shooting horizontal, delivering vertical. Obviously this isn't the only way to do it. A lot of people have other techniques that they'd like to use. Shooting vertical only works if you know 100% that the client is never gonna ask you for the horizontal video. If you think there's even a 1% chance of the client asking for a horizontal version, I would most likely shoot horizontal just to be safe. Hopefully this video sparks some ideas that you can use in your workflow. Let me know if you have any other questions down below in the comments. Let me know if you have any other questions about anything else about shooting live events in general. We like to make more YouTube videos about these things because I'm experienced in it. I'm not necessarily good at it. I'm experienced with doing it. All right, my name is Alex Chung and until next time, I will see you later, bye.