Video rotation

[onewiseguy]

I use Openshot quite a bit as I have found it to be the best (simplest and most intuitive) Linux video editing app; however, I am frustrated by the lack of true video rotation. In today's digital age, many people such as myself record video in portrait mode because we are videoing our kids and grandkids and wish to be as close as possible without all the useless space on the side. we record in the vertical because we are taller than we are wide. The rotation feature does not truly rotate the entire video, it rotates the video but keeps the same landscape orientation instead of rotating the entire orientation from landscape to portrait. What this does is effectively cut off the top and bottom portions of the video in order to fit inside the vertical parameters of landscape orientation. I have found very few video editing programs that actually rotate the entire video and change the orientation from landscape to portrait.........and none for Linux. I'm forced to switch to Windows to use an app I have found that actually rotates the orientation of the video but the downside is that it reduces the quality and saves it on only .avi format. It would be fabulous if Openshot actually rotated the orientation of the video when selecting to rotate. Am I the only one who sees this as a very valuable feature?

[Cenwen]

Hi,

You are a lucky man because this feature is already present in Openshot and since a while.

In fact as usual, there are not one but two ways to realize that in Openshot.
You have an easy way for the common users who is in the textual menu of the clip. And here, you chose your kind of rotation that you 'd like.
You can too apply an effect called rotation (in fact it is the same used) and open the Clip properties. At the last section/tab you select your effect (you can used several effects for one clip) and edit his properties. It is more for people who search something more precise same if you can do this operation easily i.e. you could choose for sample an rotation of 85° instead of a 90°)
You should take a look at our manual on the utilisation of Openshot that you have installed in the same time of Openshot.
You have too the HTML version of this one here : http://www.openshotusers.com/help/en/
You could check on this forum too the answers given at this question and see better how it is working.

Thanks.

[onewiseguy]

cenwen, thanks for the response and the followup in my launchpad bug report. I tried responding to the bug report email with attachments of a sample video showing the original video, the rotated video using the Windows app and a rotated video using Openshot. Not sure if the attachments got thru so I just emailed the videos to you directly. The videos will clearly show what I am referring to. Thanks and I look forward to seeing how this shakes out.

[Cenwen]

Thanks for the video files.
Like that, I understand better what do you want and I played with.
Unfortunately, our effect rotation can not provides you the result that you 'd like. It is better than you have send me but not the final result that you want.
The frei0r-plugins fail for this ask.
I see only tree others tool in the Linux land which could reach this purpose : Mencoder, Transcode and perhaps FFmpeg.
I tried FFmpeg without success.
I know Transcode and I'll try soon I found more time. But it is without guaranty.

[onewiseguy]

I did some some research on FFmpeg, Transcode and Mencoder. I was able to rotate the video using mencoder by using the following command:

mencoder -vf-add rotate=1 SAM_0095.mp4 -oac mp3lame -ovc x264 -o SAM_0095_mencoder_rotated.mp4

Here is a breakdown of the options I passed to mencoder:

-vf-add This tells mencoder that there is a video filter option to be added

rotate=1 This tells mencoder that the video filter is rotate and that the value is "1" which equals a 90 degree clockwise rotation

-oac This tells mencoder what audio codec to use. "mp3lame" was the audio codec I specified

-ovc This tells mencoder what video codec to use. "x264" was the video codec I specified

-o This tells mencoder what the name of the output file should be.

Here are the audio and video codec options:

Available Video codecs:
copy - frame copy, without re-encoding. Doesn't work with filters.
frameno - special audio-only file for 3-pass encoding, see DOCS.
raw - uncompressed video. Use fourcc option to set format explicitly.
nuv - nuppel video
lavc - libavcodec codecs - best quality!
xvid - XviD encoding
x264 - H.264 encoding

Available Audio codecs:
copy - frame copy, without re-encoding (useful for AC3)
pcm - uncompressed PCM audio
mp3lame - cbr/abr/vbr MP3 using libmp3lame
lavc - FFmpeg audio encoder (MP2, AC3, ...)


Here are the options for the rotate function:

rotate[=<0-7>]
Rotates the image by 90 degrees and optionally flips it. For
values between 4-7 rotation is only done if the movie geometry
is portrait and not landscape.

0 Rotate by 90 degrees clockwise and flip (default).

1 Rotate by 90 degrees clockwise.

2 Rotate by 90 degrees counterclockwise.

3 Rotate by 90 degrees counterclockwise and flip

I tried the various audio and video codecs. Interestingly enough, although the documentation states that the lavc video codec produces the best video quality, I found that to NOT be the case. The best video quality by default appears to be the x264 video codec. I saw no pixel degradation whatsoever when using x264.

[yvaine_1]

This was SO helpful. I’m making a video of my niece’s preschool christmas program to send out, and this worked great. Thanks.

[onewiseguy]

yvaine_1, Glad to hear the info has helped someone else with the same problem.

[Cenwen]

A quick update

I tried Transcode and it is working but unfortunately, Transcode doesn't work on this sort of files (only mpeg1/2/4, Xvid). So, doing a conversion is a possibility but the quality is worse. Then we won't use this great tool.

I found on the mailing list of Ffmpeg the good command line but unfortunately, he does'nt recognize my option 'vf filters' and I have not yet find the solution.
And the core engine is aware of this problem/issue. Something will be certainly done in our framework at this level, when we 'll find the solution.
Thanks for your patience to this subject.