Have you ever had that moment when you thought you were taking a great video, for example the surprise party for your best friend, only to realise later on when you play it back, that the video was in vertical mode? Well, we’ve seen a lot of those kinds of videos on Facebook, YouTube, Vine, etc. And while it is just okay when playing on your smartphone, the black bars can be quite distracting when played on a bigger screen. Now you have Horizon to the rescue.
The job of this app is quite simple: no matter what position or direction you take your videos, it will always come out in the proper way, which is horizontal. You can take a video vertically, turn it upside down and back again, sideways or whatever, and the finished product will still be horizontal. This is not through magic but through the gyroscope of your device which puts the video on auto-levels to make sure it’s horizontal always.
It can shoot in either VGA, HD or Full HD, depending on the device. It can also give you three quality options (High, Medium, Low) to help you save space if you need it. You have three options for levelling modes as well. Flex will adjust the frame for maximum viewport, so when you tilt your device, it will automatically adjust the zooming scale. The Rotate mode helps the frame stay fixed, even if you constantly rotate from vertical to horizontal and back again. But if you want your phone to just take videos normally (maybe you’re in love with those black bars), then you can put it in Locked mode.
You can use either the front or back camera for the app, and other apps can also use it to record the video for them. There is a free version of the app, which lets you take 15 seconds of video, but there is a logo embedded in them of course. If you pay the $0.99 price, you get unlimited recording, access to future additions to the app, and yes, removing that annoying logo as well. You can download Horizon from the Google Play Store.