Your new digital camera takes great videos, right? And you have a nice 2GB flash/SD/whatever card in there so you can take plenty. But there’s one problem: you have lots of movies in portrait format, where you were holding the camera on its side, because after all that is how the major axis of a person is oriented. And when you import them onto your PC, rotating them is not easy. (I’m talking to Windows users here; personally I use mencoder under Linux, no problem, but Mrs Elbeno won’t let me replace Windows on her laptop, and to the in-laws I might as well be talking Martian).
Enter RotateAVI. (download the beta)
I wrote this program because I had exactly this problem. I know there are ways to rotate movies, sure, but they aren’t simple. Either you use Windows Movie Maker to do one movie at a time (with multiple clicks & drags) or you brave the complexity of VirtualDub.
Features of RotateAVI:
- Rotate 90, 180, 270 degrees, or mirror X or Y. That’s kind of why I wrote it.
- Batch processing. Choose multiple input files, an output directory, and off you go. Percentage and remaining files are displayed in the titlebar, and disk access uses a big buffer, so you can go do something else.
- It’s “lossless”. Not really lossless, but the output format is pretty much exactly what your camera would have (should have?) produced, rather than compressed by some other video codec. MJPEG in, MJPEG out, so you can consider rotated versions as good as the originals. Any meta-information (camera data) in the file is preserved.
Limitations:
- It only works with MJPEG avis. Which is what most (if not all) digital cameras produce since they are very easy to make from still JPEG files.
- It’s not super fast. But it’s not that slow. It’s pretty much bound by the speed of the JPEG codec, I think. It processes one of my files, 164MB (1:32 of video) in 1:35. And as I mentioned, you’re not expected to sit there watching a progress bar.
- Untested other than having run it on my files (off a Canon Powershot A700). This is a beta!
So if anyone who passes by my blog wants to give it a try and report back bugs (or praise!), or suggest other features, I’m all ears.