Should Portrait and Landscape Video Use the Same Compression Settings?
CRF and encoder speed behave identically for portrait and landscape; there is no "portrait needs a higher CRF" rule. What should differ by orientation is resolution, because the two are watched differently.
Same pixel count, different display
A 1080×1920 portrait video plays almost full-screen on a phone, so every pixel is used. A 1920×1080 landscape video embedded in a 640-pixel-wide web player has its extra pixels scaled away on display — no visual benefit, only extra size.
Both have the same total pixels, so at the same CRF the encoding difficulty depends mainly on content (how much motion and detail), not orientation.
What each resolution option produces
| Option | Landscape 1920×1080 original | Portrait 1080×1920 original |
|---|---|---|
| Longest edge 1920px (1080p) | Unchanged | Unchanged |
| Longest edge 1280px (720p) | 1280×720 | 720×1280 |
| Longest edge 854px (480p) | 854×480 | 480×854 |
| Scale to 1/2 | 960×540 | 540×960 |
"Longest edge" looks only at the larger of width and height, so 720p means 1280 wide for landscape and 1280 tall for portrait. Scaling only shrinks, never enlarges, and output sizes are even numbers.
Choose resolution by where it plays
| Orientation | Typical playback | Suggested resolution |
|---|---|---|
| Portrait | Full-screen phone (short video, chat, social) | Longest edge 1920px; 1280px for chat only |
| Landscape | Full-screen desktop or TV | Longest edge 1920px or original |
| Landscape | Small embedded web player, email attachment | Longest edge 1280px |
| Either | Screen recording, small text | Original or 1920px; do not shrink hard |
Target size ignores orientation too
Target size computes the bitrate from duration and steps resolution down when the bitrate is too low. It compares how much data each pixel gets per frame, so portrait and landscape with the same pixel count land on the same step. For example, a 1-minute 1080p video at 10 MB gets about 1.2 Mbps for the picture: landscape drops to about 960×540, portrait to about 540×960.
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