The eagle eyed amongst you will have spotted a new video on the videos page of Dawn trapezing. It is only a short minute or two long, but you get the idea of what she has been up to all these Monday evenings! I'm very proud of her, she looks very good flinging herself around quite a small wooden bar suspended by two pieces of rope!

That's it for the video part, what follows is a bit more techie. You see, when the video was taken they held the camera portrait, so when you view it back on the PC, you have to cock your head to the left to see it. No problem I thought, I'll get that rotated in a jiffy and uploaded. Hmm, not that simple. Windows Movie Maker or Picasa don't do stuff like that, so I had to find another way.

The way I did find was VirtualDub, a great little open source application that takes a movie, and allows you perform batch operations on it. It then exports the movie to an AVI file. Ideal for what I wanted, as it had a rotate filter. Take a look at it and see if it is useful for any video processing you commonly do, beats paying for video software!

For those of you who may have found this post wanting to rotate a video, here's how you do it.

  • Download and open VirtualDub.
  • File > Open video file... and choose the movie you want to rotate.
  • Now go to Video > Filters. In the dialog box that opens click on Add, and scroll down to rotate and rotate2.

Rotate will rotate the video as is, no cropping, but won't keep the resolution, so will be stretched in services like YouTube. rotate2 on the other hand keeps the frame size the same, and fills in the blank space with a black background (you can change the colour), but it does clip the image slightly. In order to keep the same resolution and avoid stretching, I chose this option, but play around to fully understand how each option works.

  • Click OK, and enter the rotation angle, either 90 or 270, don't click expand frame to fit.
  • This adds it to the filter dialog, click OK.
  • You should now be back to the main window. Move the timeline slider a little to see the results of you rotation on the right hand side.
  • To avoid your outputted AVI file being GBs in size, you now need to choose a compression.
  • Go to Video > Compression and choose a compression Codec, I used the DivX® codec, but just experiment and see which results in the best output quality for the best file size.
  • Now you've chosen a codec go to File > Save as AVI, choose a location for your file and save.

And voila, your video has been rotated! Any questions ask them in the comments, otherwise enjoy Dawn, the right way up, trapezing!