The rise of vertical video

Today, so much video content is captured and consumed on smartphones: a fan recording and sharing that memorable moment at a rock gig, a citizen journalist capturing the instant a peaceful rally turns violent, or simply snapping a few seconds from a day in your life to post on Instagram or Snapchat.

Increasingly, this video content is vertical. Across the web, social media and digital storytelling, vertical video is on the rise, and has been for some time.

Challenges and opportunities

Adopting this new(ish) format presents both challenges and opportunities, and we've had interesting discussions about this with storytellers.

For a start, what is the best strategy when it comes to using vertical video? Will you stick to shooting landscape first, then vertical second? Will you simply adapt your landscape video for vertical? Or use a dual approach, specific to each project?

The answers to these questions will differ depending on your audience demographic, content strategy and focus, size of your team and platform. However, for all storytellers, the opportunities of moving forward with this format could be plentiful.

When it comes to Shorthand, our goal is to ensure that you can tell your story in a way that best suits that story. That's why we've added vertical video as an option to the Title and Text Over Media sections.

Always on the move

Like the action-packed videos being captured on smartphones, storytelling technology does not stand still.

When we launched Shorthand 2.0 back in June 2017, our team and customers alike were super excited — especially about the mobile enhancements. There was plenty to boast about.

However, one element we felt needed more work was full screen autoplay video on mobile devices in the Title and Text Over Media sections.

When the original Shorthand launched, many mobile devices blocked autoplay video completely. But as smartphone consumption grew and vertical video became more popular, autoplay video became technically available on many devices.

However, there was still some ambiguity about how autoplay video was working on certain devices and browsers. On Shorthand stories, some devices (mostly Android) defaulted to the portrait fallback image, while others (mainly iOS) showed autoplay. We needed consistency.

After speaking to storytellers, working out the preferential treatment and mechanics, we unlocked autoplay video to all devices that could technically support it. (Note: some older smartphones still block autoplay video.)

This was a step in the right direction, but it became clear even more enhancements were needed.

The automatic cropping of landscape orientation video on portrait screens was often less than ideal, especially if the focal point of the video was off-centre. See the example to the right/below).

Automatic crop in Shorthand on Title section (before the new changes)

While custom CSS could be applied to stories to hide/show particular sections on mobile, we wanted to solve the problem properly, and we wanted to solve it in a way that retained Shorthand's trademark simplicity.

Automatic crop in Shorthand on Title section (before the new changes)

Introducing vertical video uploads

This month, we unveiled enhanced media upload modals across Shorthand with a bunch of tweaks we have been working on for a while.

The star of the show is certainly the vertical video upload in the Title and Text Over Media Section though.

We already had a portrait fallback image for tall screens, but now you can add a separate vertical video too. (Note the media guidelines: vertical videos should be 1080 x 1920 pixels in size and should be no more than 5mb per 5 seconds in weight. And don't forget to add a video for wide screens as well! Find out more here.)

So, regardless of the video strategy you choose - you can be sure that your content is going to make an impact on wide and tall screens in Shorthand.

What do you think?

We're always eager to get your feedback on how new features are working for you, and to hear about other enhancements you'd like to see in the future.

Get in touch with us if you want to have a chat about vertical video or anything else!