Video Editing - Rotate a clip 90 degrees

[blueST]

I have been sent a video clip in MP4 format that someone took at our wedding. Unfortunately, they held their camera on it's side (portrait). This means the video needs to be rotated 90 degrees. I have a Mac and use IMovie for editing but I don't think it's able to rotate the footage. I can't try anyway, as the clip is over 9 minutes long and so IMovie wont import it. Any suggestions?

Edited: Just discovered that the person operating the camera realised their mistake and turned it the right way after about a minute. That'll teach me to watch it all the way through before putting fingers to keyboard. Still interested to know the answer as I have had this problem once before.

Edited by blueST on Tuesday 20th January 13:17

[Fordo]

not sure you can do it in imovie, as i dont use it myself, but i do have the final cut pro suite. id be happy to rotate the video for you, and pass it back in whatever format you require.

Any chance you can upload it to a server for me to download?

Just discovered you can do it in quicktime. (not sure if youd need quicktime pro or not)

Open movie in quicktime, at the top, goto window, show movie properties

in the window that pops up, click on Video Track, then click on visual settings- theres options there to flip/ rotate

You can also use quicktime to slice up a movie clip, using the sliders in the play bar, then edit copy, edit paste- then you can save each section as a new video file- this means you can chop up your vid and only rotate the portrait section

hope that helps

[blueST]

Had a look at Quicktime as you suggest, unfortunately it seems both the ability to rotate and to slice it in to smaller chunks are Pro only features. Now I know that most of the footage is ok, it needs the first few moments rotating, or cutting off and discarding. Then all it needs is chopping down into a number of less than 9 min segments so that I can put it in IMovie.

Thanks for the offer of sorting it for me, but the file size is 1.25Gb so I'm not sure where I could host it on-line. I might just buy Quicktime Pro, it's only £20. I've just bought a new miniDV camcorder so I'm sure I'll make use of it.

[cirks]

Just found this online so may help you for the bit that you do want to rotate:

article said:

"I did find a free program called VirtualDub, but then found another link that told me that the answer was installed on my computer all along.


Windows Movie Maker is part of the "free" software that comes bundled with XP. It has been criticized as being lightweight, probably because it can't author DVDs natively. I instructed Staci to start up the program. She loaded the .AVI file from the Canon and added it to the timeline. Then she located the Rotate filters located in the Collections\Video Effects screen. After applying the desired Rotate filter (90, 180, or 270 degrees), she exported the video and it was ready for YouTube. You can view the result here."

[Fordo]

blueST said:

Had a look at Quicktime as you suggest, unfortunately it seems both the ability to rotate and to slice it in to smaller chunks are Pro only features. Now I know that most of the footage is ok, it needs the first few moments rotating, or cutting off and discarding. Then all it needs is chopping down into a number of less than 9 min segments so that I can put it in IMovie.

Thanks for the offer of sorting it for me, but the file size is 1.25Gb so I'm not sure where I could host it on-line. I might just buy Quicktime Pro, it's only £20. I've just bought a new miniDV camcorder so I'm sure I'll make use of it.

yeah, for £20 you cant go wrong- i use quicktime pro quite a lot for the odd task here and there- you can use it to transcode to other formats, and theres lots of export presets for things like ipods/ iphones etc

[mikee boy]

Try www.dvdvideosoft.com specifically http://www.dvdvideosoft.com/products/dvd/Free-Vide...

I've downloaded their excellent and FREE software which includes a video rotator, but I've never used that feature.

PM me if you need more details.