Handy video rotate utility

Laurence wrote on 1/26/2012, 12:46 PM
I just had a request to rotate some smart-phone video 90 degrees (they had shot the video with the camera-phone sideways like lots of people think they can do). Anyway, I tried putting it in Vegas but it was starting to get very akward. The video showed the proper orientation in the preview window, but flipped sideways when I previewed fullscreen. The video was an odd size as well. Since it was starting to look like it was going to be more trouble than it was worth, I started thinking "wouldn't it be neat if there was some little utility that just rewrote the header so correct the playback of the video" and I started to look for such a utility. This is what I found:

http://www.dvdvideosoft.com/guides/free-video-flip-and-rotate.htm

The quality on a high quality image suffers considerably after a rotate so I think it is rerendering rather than just rewriting the header, but on a sideways cell phone video, it looks fine.

Does anyone know of a utility that actually just rewrites the header?

Comments

johnmeyer wrote on 1/26/2012, 1:05 PM
I know of many lossless JPEG still image rotators, but I know of nothing that can losslessly rotate a video image.

I'm not sure why you are having problems. I have had to rotate cell phone video and I just apply 90 degree rotation using pan/crop (I try to stay away from track motion for this sort of thing).

What puzzles me is that you say it doesn't preview correctly "fullscreen." Do you mean on an external monitor?

As for the video size being odd, that is a basic square peg/round hole issue, namely that if you rotate something that was landscape, it will now be portrait. If you then want to force that portrait view back into a landscape format, so it fits with the rest of your video, you will either have to zoom in, or accept pillars at the sides. This will be true even if you do find something that can flip the video without recompressing.

My advice is to use pan/crop. It should work just fine, and you can decide whether to zoom in to eliminate the pillars, or just accept the "portrait image in a landscape view" problem.

If you still have issues, post the VEG file and I'll try to figure out what's going on (although if you are doing this in Vegas 11, I only have Vegas 10).

[edit]Oh, one last thing. Make sure to use "Best" when rendering because Vegas is going to have to resample the video and "Best" does a much better job when the video must be rotated and scaled.[/end edit]
Laurence wrote on 1/26/2012, 1:41 PM
By fullscreen I mean when you hit the television icon so that the preview fills the screen.

In Vegas I tried both pan and crop rotation and setting the output rotation in the project properties. Ether way, with Vegas I get worse results than when I use the rotation utility. Yes I'm using "best" rendering quality.
R0cky wrote on 1/26/2012, 1:45 PM
Why can't you just set the rotation in media properties?

rocky
Laurence wrote on 1/26/2012, 4:00 PM
>Why can't you just set the rotation in media properties?

Because I didn't think of it. Yeah that's the way it should be done of course. Thanks.