When making video footage with a video camera it often happens, especially with mobile phone footage, to shoot the video in the wrong orientation, which therefore is seen upside down or otherwise crooked . Very often, then, when recording a video from the smartphone, one makes the mistake of keeping the phone vertical, which can be seen well on the phone screen, but which has a poor performance when seen then on TV or on the computer or when it is shared on Facebook or other social networks. The most expensive and professional cameras have the sensor that takes into account the movement of the wrist and rotate the video recording automatically but with many models of cameras, cameras and mobile phones this is not possible. It is therefore necessary to correct the orientation of the video and rotate it in order to be able to see it again on the computer or on the television, in a correct way, without causing the headache and without seeing it vertical and narrow.
Rotating a video is very simple, rotating parts of a video is not.
In fact, unless you have made a deliberate or random mistake involving the entire video footage, it happens that, having the video camera in hand, there are straight pieces and overturned pieces. Below we see then the best ways to rotate a video in its entirety or only in some parts using only free programs to download or standard programs already present on Windows PCs and Macs and then how to rotate vertical videos on iPhone and Android .
As for the PC and Mac programs, first of all, it should be noted that after a video is rotated it will be more stretched (as is the case for photos) and will not have the same resolution as the original one. Before making any changes, therefore, it is better to make a copy of the original video so, if the final result does not please you, you will not lose anything and you can try it in some other way.
1) A program that was the best until a few years ago and can still be used on Windows 7, 8 and 10 to rotate videos even by selecting scenes, it is Windows Movie Maker that works well for Avi and Mpeg formats while it doesn't go equally well on classic video formats of MP4 and 3GP phones and YouTube FLV videos.
In this case it is better to convert the videos to avi or mp4 with programs like Handbrake or Format Factory.
To open the video to be corrected you can go to the File menu and then to -> Import and drag the video, from the collection to the storyboard below.
you can still use the good old, much improved and easier to use. Once the original video file is opened, simply click on one of the rotation buttons from the bar at the top of the screen. Either way, Windows Movie Maker rotates 90 degrees or 180 degrees left or right across the entire video. To select separate parts of the movie to be converted, you must use the split which, on the new Movie Maker, is activated by pressing the right mouse button on a piece of video and choosing the option to divide that part from the rest. For example, if you only need to shoot a part of the movie that is in the middle, divide the video into three parts, rotate the inverted one and then save everything together. The biggest flaw is that the video can only be saved in wmv format.
2) The Photos App in Windows 10 has integrated many of Movie Maker's video creation tools and allows you to rotate videos and parts of them. To do this, open Photos from the Windows 10 Start menu, then create a new video project using the button at the top. In the new video project, add a video from your PC and then use the rotate button at the bottom to rotate it as you want, horizontally or vertically. If you need to rotate only a part of the video, you can press the Split button, select the upside down part and then rotate only that part.
2) A more powerful but less simple program than Movie Maker, which however does not support mobile video formats such as mp4 and 3gp, is VirtualDub, a free video editing program .
With this opensource software it is possible to rotate the video not only by 90 degrees but also with a smaller angle so as to put back on purpose scenes that had been shot crooked. From VirtualDub, rotation is obtained using one of the filters called rotate and rotate2 which makes the rotation angle chosen.
Always dividing the movie into clips, you can apply this filter and save the new video in AVI format.
3) Free Video Flip Rotate of DVDVideosoft hallmark and security. This program does just that, rotates and rotates videos 90 degrees, 180 degrees, clockwise, counterclockwise, vertically or horizontally.
4) VLC, among its many functions, also has video rotation .
These filters can be activated by going to Tools and then to Effects and Filters .
From the video effects tab, you go to the " Geometry " section from which you can rotate the video, while you see it, in real time, at the angle you prefer via a wheel that looks like a stereo knob. Once you have chosen the degree of rotation: press on the Media menu, click on Convert and save, Add the file to be rotated, click on Convert and save below, choose where to save the destination file that will be created by giving it a name, choose the video format from the drop-down menu, put the flag on " show the result " and start. In theory, you could shoot the video with the knob, while creating it, so as to arrange the parts to put straight. The problem this time is that VLC uses a lot of CPU in this process and the result may not be optimal depending on the case and the computer.
5) Two websites allow you to rotate videos and only require you to upload them online and then download them upside down or rotated, they are:
- //rotatemyvideo.net/
- Rotate videos
On Mac OS X computers, you can use VLC but above all there is the iMovie program, similar to Movie Maker, free, easy to use and which, from the 2008 version, has the ability to rotate videos.
On Android and iPhone, on the other hand, you can rotate vertical videos using Google Photos, which is not only an automatic backup and photo and video viewing app, but also has the tool for rotation.
Once automatic backup is activated, you can then open any video already saved by Google Photos in its unlimited space, touch the pencil icon to find the editing tools and rotate it.
To try other ways of rotating videos, I refer to the list of video editing apps for Android and iPhone .
READ ALSO: No more vertical videos with Horizon, an app for Android and iPhone
