Portrait videos, the scourge of the Internet. This threat is even more dangerous than the NSA overstepping it boundaries, and it must be stopped in our lifetime! OK, I got a little overwrought there, but seriously, can we stop it with the portrait orientated videos?
Horizon for iPhone, now available in the App Store for the introductory price of $0.99 is doing its best to stamp out vertical (portrait) shot videos. When using this simple app, no matter how you hold your phone, the video is recorded in the proper landscape format. You know – The way God, and Steve Jobs intended.
Horizon uses the accelerometer and gyroscope built-in to an iPhone or iPad to scale and rotate input from the camera on the fly to generate videos that are always in landscape, disregarding the way the device is being held. It calculates the tilt of the device, and then generates video that is rotated in the opposite direction to give you properly horizontally oriented videos.
I played with the app for a spell, and found that the app did as advertised, properly orientating the video, and while the app scales the output so it can show a landscape result, the output is of a descent quality. There was some stutter, but in all fairness, I was rotating my iPhone 5s all through the shot, so some of that was probably from my shaky aiming.
I’d say Horizon is worth a try if you always find yourself shooting video in portrait mode, or it is definitely worth a gift to users you know who constantly shoot portrait video and post it on Facebook.
Horizon is available for the iPhone and iPad for an introductory price of $0.99 in the App Store. [DIRECT LINK]
