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Vlogging & creation

Osmo Pocket 4P: shooting vertical without cropping

4 min readL’équipe Fox Rider
A woman holds a pocket gimbal camera at arm’s length by a river, in front of a clock tower, at dusk

The question comes up with every pocket camera rental: “I post on TikTok and Instagram, so I film normally and crop afterwards, right?” You can, and it is what most cameras force you to do. But with the DJI Osmo Pocket 4P it is the wrong reflex, and three lines of arithmetic are enough to show it.

The arithmetic, in pixels

A 4K video in 16:9 is 3,840 pixels wide by 2,160 high. To get a vertical 9:16 shot out of it you keep the full height and throw the sides away: what is left is 1,215 pixels wide by 2,160 high, or 2.6 megapixels. More than two thirds of the width has gone in the bin.

DJI’s spec sheet gives the Pocket 4P a native vertical mode of 1,728 by 3,072 pixels, up to 60 frames per second. That is 5.3 megapixels, twice as many — and above all 3,072 pixels of height instead of 2,160. On a phone held upright, that height is exactly what you are looking at.

What that changes while filming

  • The frame is right straight away. What you see on the screen is what will be published. Cropping afterwards means framing without the subject in front of you — and that is how heads get cut off.
  • The stabilisation works on the right frame. The mechanical three-axis gimbal holds the image that is actually being recorded. Cutting into an already stabilised image afterwards is better than nothing, but it is not the same thing.
  • Subject tracking too. DJI lists ActiveTrack 8.0, which keeps the subject inside the frame. That frame still has to be the one you will publish.

Pocket gimbal camera with its screen folded out horizontally showing 16:9, next to a fill light

Three aspect ratios, and a screen that swivels

DJI’s spec sheet lists three aspect ratios: 16:9, 9:16 and 1:1. The 2-inch screen folds out and swivels, and DJI devotes a whole tutorial to it — “Rotatable Touchscreen and Button Features”, four minutes thirty-eight, in English and with no subtitles at all. The same goes for all four videos I send out with this camera: all in English, two with no subtitles whatsoever. I mention it because that is precisely the kind of detail that decides whether a renter finds the setting or misses it.

What native vertical does not solve

Sound first. A vertical shot is almost always somebody talking, and the microphone of a camera held at arm’s length picks up the street as much as the voice. According to the Pocket 4P product page as of 30 August 2026, a wireless microphone kit is listed among the included accessories, at zero euros; check that page when you book, it is the reference.

Light next. A face filmed indoors at the end of the day is a grey face, and no sensor makes up for light that is not there. A fill light is also listed among the included accessories on that page. DJI devotes the shortest of its four videos to it, one minute fourteen.

A hand holding a pocket gimbal camera outdoors, its twin lenses angled upward

Two limits to know before you film everything vertically

A vertical shot cannot be cropped back to 16:9. It works one way only. If the same sequence has to serve YouTube and TikTok, shoot 16:9 and accept the loss when you crop, or shoot it twice.

And the log profile does not follow you everywhere: DJI restricts 10-bit D-Log 2 to the 1× zoom, that is, to the wide lens alone. In slow motion and time lapse, only the 1× and 3× optical focal lengths remain selectable. Log and telephoto therefore do not combine. What the twin lens changes sets out that division.

Pocket camera standing on a round table with two wireless microphones, their case, a fill light and a grip

And if you want both formats at once

Then it is not a pocket camera you need but a 360: it records the whole sphere and you pull as many vertical and horizontal framings out of it afterwards as you like. That is the principle described in making vertical content with a 360 camera. The price to pay: lower resolution on each extracted framing, and one more editing step. To set the ground rules, the guide to video formats; to decide between the two cameras, the X6 versus Pocket 4P comparison.

The practical side

The Pocket 4P rents by the day or by the week, with a €200 deposit held and returned in full. The box goes out with a 1 TB SanDisk Extreme microSD card, on top of the 103 GB of internal memory DJI quotes, and a rental can run up to 62 days. The current rate and the full detail are on the Pocket 4P product page.

See the available dates for the DJI Osmo Pocket 4P

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