A Babble Joint
In the latest update, Instagram for iOS fixed some bugs, added Cinema (stabilization) support for front-facing camera recording, yada, yada, yada. What really has me geeked about this update is the ability to shoot photos and record video in landcape mode.
Portrait Mode vs. Landscape Mode
It’s highly common to see video recorded on smartphones uploaded and shared everywhere on the web. Most of those videos I’ve seen are squeezed between black bars that seem to take up all the extra space to the left and right of the video. This is the case because people recorded those videos holding their phones vertically (portrait) versus rotating their phones horizontally (landscape mode) before recording.
When videos recoded in portrait mode are played back on slick widescreen TV’s, computers and other video devices, the dreaded black bars appear due to the difference between the format used to record the video and the device/platform used to playback the video. The simple solution is to rotate your smartphone so it’s horizontal to the ground before recording.