How to rotate a sideways, portrait-style video

Peyton-Todd wrote on 4/16/2012, 9:34 PM

I have a .MOV video of two people dancing, shot by a friend with a cell phone that's oriented portrait style (taller than it is wide), so there's a lot of wasted space at the top and bottom. My goal is to crop it so one can get a closer look at the dancers.

When I load it into Vegas, the project properties default to NTSC DV (720x480, 29.970 fps), with major letter-boxing and the picture lying on its sides (dancers' heads to the left). If I simply render it as is, the result shows up just like that, letter-boxed and on its side, even though the original plays right side up. Even when I change the project properties to rotate it ninety degrees and render that it still shows up letter-boxed and on its side.

What can I do to make it render right-side up, and cropped into a landscape orientation, preferably 4x3 ratio?

Thanks for your help.

P.S. I seem to remember there's a place where you can tell the project to take its properties from the video file itself, but I can't find it now. Shouldn't it be doing that as a default anyway? (I've never told it to start all projects set in a certain way.)

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 4/16/2012, 9:45 PM

Project properties pretty much never default to the source video. If the source video is some standard format then there's already a template for it. If it isn't some standard format then you most likely don't want the project to match it. Set your project up for the output you want.

Insert the clip on the timeline. In Pan/Crop, rotate the image 90 or 270 degrees, whichever puts it right-side up. You can then continue using Pan/Crop to zoom in as you wish. You may have to drag the cropping frame out wider (which will actually be the up/down dimension in the pan/crop window) in order to avoid cropping on the sides.

Peyton-Todd wrote on 4/18/2012, 7:52 PM

Thanks, but neither 90 degrees nor 270 degrees (actually "90 degrees counterclockwise") has any effect on how the image appears, neither immediately in the preview window nor when it is rendered.

PeterWright wrote on 4/18/2012, 8:02 PM

To get a vertical rectangle change the output rotation in Project Properties.

Chienworks wrote on 4/18/2012, 9:03 PM

You're doing something way wrong then. Sorry. Pan/Crop rotation does exactly that: rotate the source video.

Peyton-Todd wrote on 4/19/2012, 8:13 PM

Could it be I misunderstood what you meant by rotation? I have been referring to the rotation one can (allegedly) accomplish in the Project Properties dialog. As I said, whenever I tell it to rotate 90 degrees clockwise (or counterclockwise) no change is visible, neither immediately on the screen nor in the rendered file. I get these same (lack of) results on two different computers where I have 64-bit Vegas 9.0 installed.

However, I have noticed that one can rotate the picture within the crop window. Is that what you had in mind all along? If so, is the rotation in the Project Properties dialog intended for some other purpose? What might that be?

Rotating in the crop window, I managed to achieve acceptable result after a while. The dancers are right-side-up. There was a problem in that the dotted-line area one adjusts stayed in its NTSC DV (720 x 480) elongated shape even though I had specified Multimedia 320 x 240 in the Project Properties dialog. But by turning off 'Lock Aspect Ratio' I was able to get very close to a 4 x 3 picture with only a tiny sliver of letter-boxing.

Nonetheless, that took a lot of adjusting, and I was never able to get rid of the last litty bitty bit of letter-boxing. Maybe there would have been an easier way if I only knew what it was. In a conversion I often perform these days, from NTSC DV 720 x 480 to Multimedia 320 x 240 but without needing to rotate, all I have to do is specify the latter in the Project Properties dialog and the dotted-line area one adjusts for cropping configures itself to exactly the right aspect ratio.

Chienworks wrote on 4/19/2012, 8:42 PM

Yep, when i said rotate in Pan/Crop, i meant the rotation in Pan/Crop. ;)

There is an issue in that Vegas' aspect ratio matching will match to the unrotated version rather than the rotated image. Ugh. So you're on your own adjusting it manually, i'm afraid.

The project properties rotation is useful if you're going to be using some fixed display device that you want to rotate 90 degrees to get a different size output. For example, if you want to turn a projector on it's side to get a 3x4 image instead of 4x3, the physical makeup of the projector and playback system mean you still have to create a 4x3 project and render a 4x3 file in order to use the full frame. The project rotation merely lets you work on the project in Vegas "right side up" while you're editing so that you don't have to look at everything on it's side the whole time. It doesn't rotate the image, it just lets you see what it will be like when played back on a rotated device.

Former user wrote on 4/19/2012, 8:45 PM

In the Media Properties window, you can Right click on your video and select Rotate 90 degrees CW or CCW.

Then when you drag that to the timeline, it fills top and bottom

Dave T2

Peyton-Todd wrote on 4/21/2012, 6:42 PM

Thanks, guys.

Dave, I should mention that the method you mentioned does succeed in rotating the picture so it appears right side up when I drag it to the timeline. However, when I try to crop it, it still appears in the 'portrait'-style (vertical accentuated) aspect ratio, and when I unlock aspect ratio I still have the same tedious task of pushing and pulling this way and that to finally arrive at a view with only minimal letter-boxing.

Peyton