Filming & Production
Square video
Also called: 1:1 aspect ratio, one by one
Square sits between the 16:9 of a standard upload and the 9:16 of a phone held upright. On YouTube it matters for one reason. A square or vertical video under three minutes gets treated as a Short, so an upload you intended as a normal video can land in the Shorts feed purely because of its shape. Square also travels well to feeds on other platforms, which is why some creators cut once at 1:1 and post the same file everywhere. The trade-off is wasted space on a widescreen player and on a television, where a large part of the screen goes to black bars.