A video filmed with the phone held the wrong way plays sideways or upside down. Rotating it turns the picture itself, so it plays the right way up everywhere: in players, on televisions, in editors and on websites.
How to rotate a video
- Upload the video (MP4, MOV, MKV, WebM, AVI, WMV, MPEG, TS and more; up to 2 GB).
- Effect: Rotate is already chosen. Under Rotation, pick:
- 90° clockwise when the top of the picture is on the left,
- 90° counter-clockwise when the top of the picture is on the right,
- 180° when the video is upside down.
- Start, and download the rotated video.
What you get
- The picture is turned, not just marked: some tools only set a rotation flag, which some players and editors ignore. Here the frames themselves are rotated, and the result has no flag left.
- Width and height swap at 90°: a 1920 × 1080 video becomes 1080 × 1920.
- Sound: the main sound track is kept, unchanged where the format allows.
- Format: MP4, MOV, MKV and WebM stay in their format; other formats become MP4. The video is re-encoded at high quality.
Phone videos and rotation flags
Phones usually store an upright video sideways and add a flag that tells players to turn it. The flag is applied before rotating, so choose the rotation from how the video looks when you play it in a web browser, which follows the flag.
If a video looks right in a browser but sideways in another program, that program ignores the flag, and the video needs no rotation: re-encoding it with the video compressor writes the picture upright and removes the flag, so every program shows it the same way.
Limits
Rotating re-encodes the whole video: about 25 minutes of 1080p video at 30 frames per second fit in one job, longer for smaller videos. Cut a long recording first with the video trimmer.
More about what this tool reads and writes: Video Effects.