We tried to do this for some digital signage video we were producing and ended up just creating a session at 1080x1920 as it worked correctly for us. Have not tried with V14 though, this was with V13 and Sony AVC.

Marco, I recently had a client who brought in hundreds of iPhone photos, many of which I rotated successfully in Paint Shop Pro. When I brought them into Vegas they lost the rotation. I rotated again in Vegas and when rendered the rotation once again was lost. I have no workaround, and had to disappoint the client.

At least the footage from a woman who held her camcorder on its side to take video of the Pope as he stood in his motorcar could be successfully rotated in Vegas. This business gets crazier and crazier!

Soft Rotation VS. Hard Rotation

"Soft" - Means the image is physically Recorded in One way while Flags / EXIF / SideCar Files tell whoever-can-read-'em the Other Way of Displaying that image. ☑️

"Hard" - Means physical Recording of image The Way It Is Supposed To Be Displayed. Does not require / have / have to have Flags / EXIF / SideCar Files. 🔴

⚠️ The important portion in text above is "whoever-can-read-'em". Warning: Not everybody can!!! ⚠️

In short:
The "Soft" stuff is for You, is for the part of the image's way From Camera To You. To reduce quality losses & possibilities of such losses to the maximum extent possible.
The "Hard" stuff is for your Client, is for the part of the image's way From You To End-User. To ensure the compliance & compatibility to the maximum extent possible.

🚫 You don't want to leave home without it being told apart! 🚫

.

As is so often the case, Apple has chosen to invent a flag to show the rotation, among several others that either are or are not now part of the wider common mp4 header syntax. VLC/ffmpeg are sometimes early adopters of Applesque style flags, which often compound more errors than they correct (such as --fullrange​​​​​​).

As is always the case, the rest of the industry, Apple's implied moral imperative notwithstanding, have either adopted, misapplied, co-opted, or just plain snubbed the would-be directive. It's hardly the first time....

So what you're saying is that you got a file that's recorded with the camera rotated & when you edit/render it out, you put the video back ON the phone and it puts black bars on, right?

I could swear I've rendered video for my Fire and it displays properly w/o doing anything special. I don't use the built in player though, I use a 3rd party one (VLC I think).

Have you tried disabling auto rotation detection on the device?

Yes, recorded an edgewise video with a smartphone (1920x1080, 90°).
Imported it into Vegas Pro. Media property is 1920x1080, 90°, while project property adopted to 1080x1920, 0°.
Changed project property to 1920x1080, 90°.
Rendered to MainConcept AVC, 1920x1080, while use of rotation property is checked.

If I playback the rendered file via the smartphone it will never be displayed as intended.
Having auto rotation disabled while holding the device edgewise, it's 16:9 with black bars on bottom and top.
Having auto rotation disabled while holding the device landscape, it's 9:16 with black bars on left and right.
Having auto rotation enabled while holding the device edgewise, it's 16:9 with black bars on bottom and top.
Having auto rotation enabled while holding the device landscape, it's 16:9 without black bars.

In my opinion the issue is that the rotation property of the render options seems to do nothing.

Edit:
In my first post I was wrong to say rendering to 1080x1920 (without using the render rotate property) would mix up the smartphone orientation. Actually it works this way. But I still can't see the sense of the rotate render option.

There is a little utility called stripper (hope that doesn't get filtered out) that removes all the metadata from a photo. Give it a try, see if you can at least get a neutral set of settings. Google "stripper photo utility"

Thanks, though it's not that I'd urgently need to use rotation. I just try to find out wether this non-functioning render option is a bug or I'm doing something wrong.

I see what you mean now. I took a video, rotated it 90 via media info, setup the project to be rotated 90 too. When I rendered out on a Sony AVC 1920x1080 30p template it put it back to horizontal width instead of the vertical I changed it to.

This seemed to work (with no noticeable slowdown in rendering my short 10 second clip to test):

*Disable rotation on the project (ie back to 0)

*change the project properties from 1920x1080 to 1080x1920.

*Render to your mp4 with changed resolution (custom) to 1080x1920.

Worked for me, give that a try. Now the only question is: will the dump phone try to outsmart you? :)

We looked into this, and Vegas is doing what the documentation in the help file indicates it will do on both ends (preview and render). The reason the OP is seeing the behavior described is because Vegas does not output the file with metadata a device can read and then react to by rotating the file according to the metadata information.

But without the metadata - isn't that certain render option (use of project rotation setting) useless then? Assumed the project property is set to 16:9 frame size (e.g. 1920x1080, not 9:16) while rotation is set to 90°, that render option does nothing.