Monday, August 30, 2010

Rotating Video on Macintosh

I have discovered that when I took photos with my iPhone still or video camera in landscape mode and viewed them on a Mac they were fine, but if I uploaded them to one particular site online and viewed them on that site, the photo was displayed in Portrait Mode and was not in the orientation for best viewing the photo or video.  The site developer said their software for uploading the photo was Windows based and that my Mac was smarter, in that it was able to ascertain the orientation of the photo while the Windows software or PC was not.

If you are on a Mac and need to rotate the original Landscape video and save it in Portrait mode, you can do so using Quicktime player 7.  This version of Quicktime 7 for Mac still runs on Snow Leopard and you have to have also purchased the extra 'mpeg2 module' from Apple to run with this old version of Quicktime to access many of the movie features.   I have found the $20 is a fair price for the added features that I have used extensively to convert old VHS tapes to viewable format for youtube videos, as well as for making DVD's using iMovie for old home movies. 

Selecting 'Show Movie Properties' under the 'Window' menu.
Then select the 'video track' of the movie

and then select 'Visual Settings' tab to rotate using the option button next to 'Flip/Rotate'

Select Save as and save the movie in the new Portrait Orientation.
I put an example of a video on my youtube site that illustrates flipping a video and rotating it 90 degrees.  Sample Rotated Video

If you need to rotate a photo, you can use various apps on your iphone  or iPad to do so, I like an app called Rotate Mojo and another called Rotater.  If using a Macintosh, you can always, use applications such as iPhoto itself or Picasa (which is available on the Picasa.com website for free).

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