Rotating 90 degrees mov or AVI files

[stavrosh]

I am receiving from my students video clips from our lectures which we eventually burn into DVDs. A number of those are shot in the wrong manner ie with the digital camera in a vertical position. Is there any software (commercial or freeware) that can rotate 90 degrees (clockwise) these video clips ?

[havema-1]

How can I convert vertical video to DV or rotate DV (and preserve interlacing):

http://www.sjoki.uta.fi/~shmhav/SVCD_on_a_Macintosh.html#vert-horiz_rotate

[stavrosh]

Thanks for the link, have you tried the solution he offers ? Using MPEG Stramclip in the preview option the clip is still rotated. I think that the link refers to the correction of the pixel ratio (once imported to Imovie).

[willrob]

You want the [free] Turn Clip filter (for iMovie) from Cfx

http://www.imovieplugins.com

[stavrosh]

Yes thats a very good approach, the free plug-in does the job. Thanks

[havema-1]

Thanks for the tip about the free turn clip iMovie plug-in. I tried it briefly and it seems nice and simple. There are some limitations with it, though:

It doesn't properly work with interlaced input because also the interlacing lines are simply rotated and this doesn't look good on a TV! So you really should use only progressive material or deinterlace the input.

It can't rotate the material without cropping.

It also doesn't seem to preserve the correct aspect ratio when rotating rectangular pixels.

The method described in the first link preserves interlacing in the rotated material (a special trick is needed for this), it doesn't crop the material (if the user doesn't want to) and it exactly preserves the aspect ratio when rotating rectangular pixel DV material in 90° increments.

Notice that the described procedure uses QuickTime Player Pro for the rotations, MPEG Streamclip for the scalings, and JES Deinterlacer for the interlacing stuff. That route is for the geeks or perfectionists but it really isn't so difficult as it might sound!

[stavrosh]

Thanks both of you for the comments. I am not a geek .... ( right now) but I would appreciate if you could describe in more detail the steps of rotating, correcting pixel-ratio and de-interlacing the material. I believe that versions of QT-Pro up to release 6.4 did not offer rotation capabilities , but I might be wrong.

It would be nice if a Imovie plug-in could do the job.

[havema-1]

> describe in more detail the steps of rotating

The commands differ slightly in QT 6 and 7.

In QT Player 6 you can rotate via Movie/Get Movie Properties/Video Track/Size/Adjust or via the flip buttons there -- you can do free rotations by enabling the red dot at the center of the image via the Adjust-button.

In QT Player 7 you can rotate via Window/Show Movie Properties/Video Track/Visual Settings/Flip_Rotate. QT Player 7 lacks the free rotation QT 6 had.

> correcting pixel-ratio

The link above has precalculated values you can use in MPEG Streamclip's Zoom and X/Y aspect values when scaling the vertically rotated video to horizontal DV.

I have verified that circles remain circles with those values when rotating rectangular pixel PAL or NTSC 4:3 or 16:9 DV material and when converting 3:4 square pixel images to rectangular pixels.

The calculations are also presented to the terminally interested. They are based on the info in this very pedantic page:

http://www.iki.fi/znark/video/conversion/

> de-interlacing the material

You can use apps like JES Deinterlacer or MPEG Streamclip to deinterlace video. See also:

http://www.sjoki.uta.fi/~shmhav/SVCD_on_a_Macintosh.html#interlacing

[thoughton]

The calculations are also presented to the terminally interested. They are based on the info in this very pedantic page:

http://www.iki.fi/znark/video/conversion/

Lovin' your use of 'terminally'.

Apparently the page was revamped at some point due to 'popular demand'!