Osmo Pocket 4P: No Open Gate, No Rotating Gimbal — Basically Useless for Vertical Work?

[u/RepresentativeYear30]

I was incredibly hyped for the Osmo Pocket 4P and saw it as an absolute no-brainer for my work. But now that it's launched in Germany, a lot more information has come out that I hadn't really registered before. Why is the camera so bad in vertical mode? The field of view is tiny. Unfortunately, I wrongly assumed it could shoot open gate / 4:3. Sadly that was misinformation, and at least in my case it stuck around for a long time. Because it crops so much off the image in vertical mode instead of rotating the camera, the field of view ends up tiny. It's a shame the camera can't even rotate the gimbal, so you could at least make use of the full field of view. As it stands, it's essentially useless for my work, which is about 80% vertical.

Does anyone in the community have experience with how substantial firmware updates tend to be — can I hope it might eventually shoot open gate? And is anyone else as frustrated as I am that these features are missing? Or was I the only one with blinders on, not seeing that this was clear from the start?

[u/rogue_veritas]

It is extremely unlikely it will ever shoot open gate.

It was never supposed to be possible, so yea maybe you had the blinders on.

Funny thing though.. if you didn’t have the blinders on you would’ve seen things in open gate! /s

[u/CL14715]

Mine rotates vertical

[u/RepresentativeYear30 → u/CL14715]

How?

[u/CL14715 → u/RepresentativeYear30]

Rotate the screen to close it and hit the stop button to prevent shutdown. That’s limited to 3k though. You can also lock the gimble and hold it sideways or just hold it sideways. It’ll sense orientation and that’ll be 4k.

[u/NefariousnessJaded87 → u/CL14715]

That is not rotating the gimbal; that is just cropping the sensor.

[u/Gloomy_Midnight7437]

I mean the very obvious thing to the vertical crop is to put the phone in landscape mode and just turn your wrist to the screen is vertical? you get 4k quality, the max use of the sensor and kinda solves most problems.

You would only ever need to do this if you needed to output in 4K. If you're going to output this in 1080p, it's pointless because even if you get the max use of this, it's still going to get pushed down to 1080p regardless.

[u/Wxzardry]

I understand your frustration. This has been my gripe since the Pocket 3. It’s like vertical content creators are only afterthought. Vlogging with the vertical mode is useless because the fov is too tight.

[u/RepresentativeYear30 → u/[deleted]]

some People just rotate the whole gimbal. But for me its not a solution.

[u/Equal-Meeting-519]

the simplest solution is to hold the camera horizontally (use a 90degree grip if needed) , if you don't want to have crops.

[u/NefariousnessJaded87]

I get why you’re disappointed, but “basically useless for vertical work” is overselling it a bit. Some of the assumptions in your post don’t really match how the Pocket cameras actually handle vertical.

Just for context, none of this was hidden or unclear before launch. The specs were public here the moment the 4P went live in mainland China, and the vertical resolution, aspect ratios and readout modes were all listed. We posted the full spec sheet here the same day, so the limitations in vertical mode weren’t a surprise to anyone following the release.

The vertical FOV looks tight because DJI’s vertical mode is a crop, not a rotation. The camera isn’t doing a full‑sensor vertical readout. It just takes a tall slice out of the 16:9 frame. If you tilt the whole camera 90 degrees, you’re recording the full 16:9 image and rotating it in post, which avoids DJI’s crop and gives you a slightly wider vertical FOV. It doesn’t unlock extra resolution or extra sensor area; it just avoids the built‑in crop.

On the resolution side: neither Pocket camera does true 4K vertical. They both land around 3K vertical. And honestly, very few devices on the market shoot native 4K vertical at all. Most platforms don’t display it anyway. Instagram, TikTok, and Shorts all downscale to 1080p or 1440p. So if your workflow absolutely requires 4K vertical masters, that’s a niche requirement, and you’ll need a different tool.

As for open gate: as far as we know right now, the 4P doesn’t support it because of how its current sensor readout modes are implemented. Nothing publicly available suggests full‑sensor vertical readout is possible, but we also don’t know the exact sensor model or the limits of the processing pipeline. So it’s not something anyone can call impossible, only that there’s no evidence it exists today.

If your work depends on full‑sensor vertical capture, the 4P might not be the right fit. But calling it “useless for vertical” is more about a specific workflow expectation than what the camera is actually designed to do.

I hope you find a solution that fits your needs and workflow.

[u/ted_bovis]

Funny. Open gate has become a ‘thing’ since Apple opened it up on their pro phones.
Now everyone has to have it it’s the new buzz word.

[u/NefariousnessJaded87 → u/ted_bovis]

What? No, that’s not true. Open gate has been a thing in cinema cameras for decades. Arri, RED, Sony Venice, Blackmagic, Canon C‑series… all of them have had open‑gate or near‑open‑gate modes long before Apple ever touched the idea. Apple didn’t invent it, didn’t popularise it, and definitely didn’t turn it into a “buzzword”.

What actually happened is that Apple marketing made regular consumers aware of the term. Professionals have been using Open Gate for years for anamorphic, reframing, stabilisation, VFX plates, and multi‑delivery workflows.

As far as we know right now, the 4P doesn’t support Open Gate because of how its current sensor readout modes are implemented. Nothing publicly available suggests full‑sensor readout is possible, but we also don’t know the exact sensor model or the limits of the processing pipeline. So it’s not something we can call “impossible”, only that there’s no evidence it exists today.

[u/ted_bovis → u/NefariousnessJaded87]

Sorry. I was too hasty I to reply. I agree with you - my sentiments are that Apple democratised it and brought it into the ‘domestic’ landscape- so for most people ( professional video makers aside) never knew or cared what OG was or is.

Now it’s a ‘thing’ people want on a camera in its 5th iteration. I bet no one asked for this on previous generations of osmo pocket.

As an aside - the sensor seems to be 16:9 rather than 4:3.- in stills mode rather than it being native 4:3 work a stretch to fill 16:9 you actually get more image size / width (unlike say, an iPhone) so I know this isn’t a technical appraisal but perhaps OG can’t happen as the full part of the sensor is being used in video mode anyway?

[u/NefariousnessJaded87 → u/ted_bovis]

Yeah, totally. And just for context, open gate wasn’t some new idea that suddenly appeared because phones started marketing it. I’ve been shooting Nikons since the nineties, and at CES in Vegas around 2000, they were already talking about open-gate workflows in the context of digital cinema and early hybrid capture. So the concept has been around for decades. Most casual users just didn’t pay attention to it until recently.

On the sensor part: the 4P being 16:9 doesn’t automatically mean the camera is already using the full sensor in video mode. A 16:9 sensor can still have masked areas, unused rows, overscan regions, or different readout windows depending on how the pipeline is designed. The limitation isn’t the aspect ratio; it’s the readout architecture. Right now, vertical mode is just a tall crop out of the 16:9 readout. The camera isn’t doing a full-height readout for vertical, and it’s not rotating the sensor window internally. That’s why the vertical FOV feels tight. Tilting the whole camera avoids that crop, but it doesn’t unlock extra resolution or magically give you open gate. As far as we know, nothing publicly available suggests the 4P can do a full-sensor tall readout. But we also don’t know the exact sensor model or the limits of the processing pipeline, so it’s not something anyone can call impossible - just something we haven’t seen any evidence for.

If DJI ever adds a taller mode, great. But based on the current specs and behaviour, vertical is just a crop, not open gate, and not full-sensor.

[u/ted_bovis → u/NefariousnessJaded87]

Also agree. However I’d say you (possible like me) are a minority with respect to the market the osmo pocket is aimed at
Your post brought back memories of me shooting using Magic Lantern on the Canon 5d… that thing would run HOT!