With more and more Tik Tok and phone app destinations coming my way, it would be nice to run the whole vMix project in 9:16, at 1080x1920 or other portrait resolutions.

Doing a whole show in portrait currently means one of 3 options, each of which requires awkward workarounds.


1. 4k canvas, with cropping in the encoder:

since there is no pixel-to-pixel input Aspect Ratio option (that's for another feature request), portrait assets come in stretched. The narrowest you can get the input with the existing Aspect Ratio options is a square. This requires one of two workarounds:
- manually squeezing the image back down to the correct aspect ratio
- rotating the asset 90 degrees before bringing it into vMix, and then rotating it 1.570796 radians back to it's original orientation, and zooming out to 0.5625 to fit the vertical dimension

- cameras can either come into vMix sideways and get the same rotation and zoom treatment, or come in at full 4k and get cropped
- monitoring a cropped 4k landscape on 1080x1920 portrait monitors (for client to see program, etc) requires setting the fullscreen outputs to a landscape resolution that is 1920 tall, and then adding a negative offset to the horizontal position of the fullscreen output in order to get the portrait image to line up and fill the portrait monitor. This can cause the fullscreens to overlap onto each other with the unused black margins if they're not set up in a specific order.


2. 4k canvas with stretching, then squeezing in the encoder

- portrait inputs all get streeeetched (Widescreen Aspect Ratio) to fill the landscape frame, and then squeezed down to 1080x1920 in the encoder to look correct
- fullscreens can be similarly squeezed to be correct on portrait monitors, but inputs and outputs all look stretched within the vMix interface


3. HD canvas with everything sideways

- cameras are run sideways, and all assets come into vMix sideways
- vMix output needs to be rotated externally, either after the stream encode or before (using a separate encoder)
- all inputs and outputs appear sideways in the vMix interface
- fullscreen monitors can simply be rotated for correct viewing


All of these options allow portrait streaming and monitoring, they just require unnecessary scaling or difficult and uncomfortable monitoring in the interface. Native portrait resolutions would eliminate all of the above considerations and let us just work with cameras and assets and fullscreen monitors as simply as we do in landscape.

vMix Call returns in portrait are also a problem. If a caller comes in from a mobile device in portrait mode (this is preferable when the stream is in portrait, in order to get the full vertical resolution the caller can provide), their browser shows white margins above and below the landscape video return feed, which contains black margins on the sides of the portrait image. In other words it gets letterboxed AND pillarboxed until it's a very small portion of the usable screen, and the fullscreen button does not function.

EDIT:

Just adding my further issues with these workarounds to the main post:

- Output Records waste lots of resources on extra pixels if using a 4K canvas
- 3840x1920 does not work well for cropping to 1080x1920, because inputs are actually 2160p, requiring non-integer scaling of input signals.
- There is no custom crop in the output encoder, which would allow integer scaling in a 2160p canvas, and then cropping the margins

+1

I just ran into another aspect of this. We are streaming at 1080x1920. Because we're running in 4K to get the full height, we are forced to record four 4K output signals in addition to the 4 HD cams, instead of the 8 HD active video pixel rasters that we're actually using. Naturally the GPU (RTX A4000) is overloading, when it would be fine with 8 HD records if we were able to run the vMix project at 1080x1920.

We can record in-camera and not in vMix, but that leaves us without a backup, and doesn't solve the main issue which is that we're only outputting four 1080x1920 signals, and we're forced to record 4 times that many pixels in order to get the full vertical resolution.

Big issue for us.

Another note here in my quest for pixel-to-pixel accuracy from input to output:

There appears to be a BUG in the 3840x1920 project resolution - the inputs are actually 3840x2160. This is apparent when I bring in a 3840x2160 image, rotate it 90 degrees (1.570796 radians) and zoom to 0.5. After doing this procedure, the resulting height of the image should be 1920 pixels, but it shows up in the Program output and stream as smaller than the full height.

I have verified that the Fullscreen output is being rendered at 1920p with a moire test pattern.

The reason I am trying to use this resolution is so that I can stream a 1080x1920 program without unnecessary non-integer scaling.

In the stream settings, I cannot crop this extra margin between the 1920p image and the 2160p raster.

If I want the image to reach the full 1920 pixel height in the stream, I have to zoom any rotated inputs (sideways 1080p cameras in this case) by 0.5625, up to 2160p. I then scale back down to 1920p in the stream by setting the Encode Size to 3413x1920, and set Aspect Ratio / Crop to Vertical. This gives me a proportionally correct stream, but soft pixels and moire due to the unnecessary scaling.

A native/pixel-to-pixel input Aspect Ratio setting would solve this, though the simplest way of achieving it would be a vertical 1080x1920 resolution for the entire project. My hope is that we get both of these options sooner than later.

All of this makes me curious, what is the intention for use of the 3840x1920 project resolution, if not to provide unscaled rotation?

I agree with the spirit of this, but looking at vMix's vast list of resolutions, there seems to be no rule other than "landscape only." Several of the options in the list are not standard broadcast or even VESA resolutions, and I can only assume they're for custom web video applications. vMix seems to be less of a broadcast/presentation switcher and more of a live web video tool in general, just not one that was designed with mobile devices in mind.

Vertical video is now everywhere on the (mobile) web, we just don't have the tools for live vertical production without workarounds. I wouldn't mind the workarounds so much if they didn't require me to either turn my head sideways and use a separate encoder on the output to rotate, or do non-integer scaling and waste 3/4 of the output render. These seem like issues vMix could quickly solve in a few different ways (rotate GUI and stream output by 90 degrees, or true 1920p input dimensions, or custom stream crop dimensions, or simply vertical aspect ratios, etc).

+1

+1

I have been doing the Turned 1080 option with all my assets for the past 2 seasons.

I record 1080P and then rotate before posting on TT or other 9:16 platforms.
I am not live streaming where that would probably not be possible.

+1