Open gate video provides essential cropping options for content creators – so why don’t all cameras have it?

Open gate has been the hot buzzword for video and hybrid cameras as of late, with the arrival of Canon’s C50 and EOS R6 Mark III cameras boasting the feature in recent months, though users of Panasonic and Fujifilm cameras have been enjoying it for some years now.

What is open gate video? It is the ability to record the entirety of a camera’s sensor when filming video, rather than cropping to a fixed panoramic aspect ratio such as 16:9 – traditionally very popular with filmmakers and videographers.

Recording the full height of the sensor makes it easier to re-crop to a portrait aspect ratio back in the editing room – useful for content creators looking to output horizontal and vertical video for, say YouTube (landscape) and TikTok (portrait).

So if it’s as simple as "just recording the whole sensor", why can’t all cameras do this?

Well, recording in this manner is incredibly inefficient and means that you end up with a lot of the frame that you don’t end up using – given that the whole point is that it gives you more real estate to crop at a later date.

Recording all this extra data could mean a camera runs into a bottleneck, whether that’s because it reaches the capacity of its processor or, if it doesn't feature active cooling, thermal limits. In many cases, it’s not possible to bring this feature to older cameras via a firmware update due to these hardware requirements.

There are, however, rare cases where it was possible to bring open gate recording to older cameras via firmware – such as the Canon EOS C400 and the Panasonic Lumix S1H, S1 and GH4. This was because the processors and thermal designs were good enough to enable the feature to be added without issues.

All of the talk of open gate reminded me of one of Apple’s most innovative choices with the iPhone 17. The front-facing selfie sensor is square for the first time, meaning images can easily be cropped to either landscape or portrait and negating the need to hold your phone at an awkward angle to take a wide-angle selfie.

Apple isn't alone, as we also saw a square sensor in the DJI Osmo Action 6. They make a lot of sense; fully capitalizing on the round imaging circle of a lens and enabling extra cropping options in post-production is, to me at least, an exciting view into the possible future of where cameras could head.

I certainly hope the trend for open gate, if not square sensors, continues!

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Which other cameras have open gate video? Take a look at the Fujifilm X-M5, X-H2S and X-S20, along with the Panasonic Lumix GH7, G9 II, S1II, S1IIE and S1RII.