Converting cell-phone Portrait video into Landscape

September 21, 2023 8:31 PM

What's it called, the technical term, where 'portrait' mode cell-phone video is converted into landscape by adding out-of-focus side panels on either side, the out-of-focus stuff based on the original?
posted by Rash to Technology (6 answers total)

Best answer: Speaking as a professional filmmaker, this doesn't really have a name as far as I know. I don't deal with much vertically-shot video in my work, though, so I may be a bit out of the loop. People just seem to call it a 'blurred background on a vertical clip' or something along those lines.

It's just putting a Gaussian blur on a copy of the clip that's been scaled up to fill the whole frame in the background. Here's somebody doing it in Premiere Pro [skip to 1:28 for the most relevant stuff].
posted by theory at 9:09 PM on September 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

Best answer: I’ve heard this called “pillarboxing” (by analogy to “letterboxing” which is the opposite: adding horizontal bars on the top and bottom of a wide video.)

Pillarboxing/letterboxing is just the general term for adding bars, often meaning black bars. I guess you could say something like “pillarboxing with content-aware blur” or something.
posted by mekily at 9:30 PM on September 21, 2023 [6 favorites]

The Wikipedia article uses the term “echo pillarboxing” to describe this specific technique with the blur… however it’s not cited so I’m not sure if that’s a standard term.
posted by mekily at 7:16 AM on September 22, 2023

I call it that horribly distracting vertical video mortise.
posted by bz at 1:05 PM on September 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: I also find it distracting, wonder why it's thought to be a good idea, and to describe it I'm going with "blurry pillarboxing" from now on.
posted by Rash at 7:47 PM on September 22, 2023

Yes. just mortise—pillar—it over black and call it good.
posted by bz at 7:50 PM on September 22, 2023