iPhone MOV to mp4, upside down??

[tpapictures]

I'm doing a video project for a friend. He shoots his footage on his iPhone8 and so I get (annoyingly) MOV files that I can't use in Vegas, where I edit. But when I go to convert with Freemake or Handbrake some of the MOVs are upside down. Can anyone tell me why this happens? I got my friend to switch the video settings to shoot mp4 instead but I still want to understand what's happening.

[smrpix]

Maybe your friend is holding the phone the other way.

And you should be able to load movs in Vegas. Install Quicktime 7 if you have to, and install "quicktime essentials" only. It's safe.

[Cornucopia]

Doesn't matter if it's MP4 or MOV (or even MKV).

Your friend is likely shooting them in landscape with the left-side-up vs with the right-side-up. The phone, and some (better) players recognize the orientation metadata (flag) and rotate the video to be right-side-up again. Some/many editors, and some (worse) players do no support or recognize the flag and so don't do any rotation. You should be able to manually do the rotation yourself. Or, with some apps, when you import them, it allows you to modify how it interprets them (incl. interlacing, AR, Stereo3d, HDR, framerate). This is just another one of those re-interpretations. IIRC, Vegas & Premiere have this, among others.

As to the annoying footage from his phone, my guess is one of 2 areas at issue: codec & framerate. One can be easily fixed, one can never be easily (or possibly even satisfactorily) fixed.

iPhones should be able to record in either MOV or MP4 container file format (and almost all decent NLEs support both, including Vegas), and are able since iOS11 or so to record using either the AVC (h264) or HEVC (h265) video codec. The usual default now is for it to be HEVC inside a MOV.
Usually when transferring footage to any device it knows is not able to support it, the phone shouls convert to a copy that is AVC inside an MP4. If for some reason that isn't happening (and you don't have a version of Vegas that is new enough to support hevc), it is quite easy to convert using ffmpeg or any variants.
Or you could tell your friend to change the default to force it to AVC in MP4.

iPhones also shoot VFR - variable framerate - (in anything except quite bright light), so in order for this to work well in an editor, it will have to be converted to CFR (constant) prior to import. Rarely (used to be never) do NLEs support direct import of vfr footage.
This cannot be avoided as both the camera sensors used and the underlying OS subsystem do not support CFR (or rather, have chosen not to support in order to cheat and get a brighter exposure for consumers).

Hope that helps,

Scott

[tpapictures]

Hope that helps,
Scott

That helps a tonne.
Is there a camera app that records video with more options on iPhone? I'd like to get him shooting 24fps but he can only do that in 4K with his iPhone8 and that's enormous overkill for what we're doing. He has very little knowledge of video specs but capable when explained properly so it's gotta be something easy to set up to my recommendations. I just wanna get him shooting 1080p at 24fps with manual white balance.

Thanks again!

Oh, and also, he is setting up the phone properly in landscape (home button on the right, correct?). The weirder thing is that this only occurs with half the files and they tend to be the longer ones.

[Cornucopia]

Filmic is probably the best but is also probably overkill. ProCamera is good.
I'm more familiar w the Android ones (Cinema FV-5, OpenCamera).

That is weird!

Scott