Turning video 90 degrees

[mubs]

I remember somebody who had a similar issue and then it was solved. I tried searching, no luck; I browsed a year's worth of posts in all the forums (1.5 years in this one), but didn't see it. So I apologize in advance for asking what may have been asked before.

My digicam can take decent video clips. I recently took some in portait mode, and when I play them back, they play sideways. How can I rotate the clips right 90 degrees and save them that way?

I presently have access only to my Thinkpad T23 (P3-1.133 GHz, W2k). Though I have a copy of Adobe Premiere Elements 2, it won't install because the system doesn't meet minimum requirements. I looked in Nero 6.6 (already installed) but couldn't find anyplace that could fix my issue. I have a copy of Nero 7 floating around somewhere, if it will help.

Any 3rd party tool that will do this for me on the configuration I have?

TIA, as always.

 

[Mercutio]

You can do it with Virtualdub, which is a free and tiny program.

 

[mubs]

Thanks, Merc, I'll give it a go.

 

[paugie]

hi, so did VirtualDub get to do it?

I'd have used it, too, if that were my problem.

 

[mubs]

Hi Paugie,

Virtual Dub can certainly do it; I was able to find where/how to do it when I launched the program for the first time (now that's saying something!).

I think my laptop doesn't have enough horsepower, though. Even using two disk drives, one for the source file and one for the output file (second one in the ultrabay slot), the frame rate seems kinda low, and when I play the straightened video, it's jerky as hell. I don't know if the problem is in the conversion, or playback, or both. The converted one seems to be darker and jerkier than the original. I guess I'll have to try once I have my desktop.

 

[timwhit]

Your problem might just be with the way you have VirtualDub setup. Make sure you have video set to do a direct stream copy or else you are completely reencoding all of the video.

 

[paugie]

let me try rotating a small clip here with VirtualDub to see what the minimum settings are. I think 'direct stream copy' setting won't allow you to rotate.
post back after a while.

 

[paugie]

ok, tried rotating a clip here.

tried it at default settings (as VirtualDub is presented) the only changes I made were in the video menu > filters > rotate.

you are right, the frame rate will seem slow. I've found out the problem.

VirtualDub won't allow you to rotate unless you are in "Full processing mode" which you are. You now have to set compression (alt>video>compression) to whatever codec you want the video to be in. It defaults to "no compression" which the hard drive on my desktop finds hard to render as the bitrate is very high hence the perception of a lower framerate. An MJPEG codec or indeo (I don't know what you want) or a
DV1 may be more manageable.

Anyway, how this helps.

 

[Sol]

Xvid or X.264 are my codecs of choice when virtual dubbing. Xvid is probably best if you want to share your clips with others (since most people don't have players that support H.264 codecs in an avi container) but X.264 is great for size so it might be worth helping someone set up a player if you want to send them a lot of clips.

 

[mubs]

Thanks folks.

My first attempt created a monster of an output file, and I caught on that compression was turned off. The original is in mJpeg, and I opted for that in the output as well, but the aforementioned problems didn't go away. Since the 35 MB original is itself somewhat jerky, I'm thinking it's the HW. The video memory is a paltry 16MB, and the chip is Tony's favorite: S3 SuperSavage/IXC. Remember it is a 2001 vintage laptop, though it does have a contemporary Sammy 100GB HDD. The 1GB RAM doesn't seem to help.

 

[timwhit]

Do you have somewhere to post the video and one of us could have a try at fixing it for you? If you need to somewhere to host it you can use my webserver. Or rapidshare.de would work as well.

 

[mubs]

Thanks for the offer, Tim. There's about 1GB worth of clips that will need to be rotated, a bit too much to upload and download back, and I'm on a monthly bandwidth if 1 GB ! My desktops will arrive eventually, ancd I'll try then.

My workhorse for the last 6 years will probably go into spasms as well; 2xP3-900, 1 GB, Radeon 9000, 2 x Seagate 250GB. The processors just ain't fast enough.

My daughter's m/c is an upgraded Dell with a P4-2.4, 1GB, Radeon 9600XT-128MB and 80GB + 120GB WD HDDs. With the oft touted advantages of Intel CPUs over AMDs for multimedia, I wonder how it will perform.

I'm especially interested in trying it out on my new desktop; A64 X2 4400, 2GB, ATI x1600-128MB, 2 x Hitachi 250GB SATA-II. If that machine sputters, something would be very wrong.

 

[Sol]

It's worth considering that the original is in mJpeg only because that doesn't require a seperate encoder in the camera (it just compresses each frame). This is roughly equivilent to having an mpeg2/4 stream with every frame being a keyframe. In fact the way your camera does it each frame won't even be very well compressed. I would expect that an xvid stream would be vastly smaller with no perceivable loss of quality.

I would expect the output from a digital camera to look very close to it's best consuming arround 5-6MB/minute with xvid and maybe 3-4MB/minute with X.264 (I have trouble seeing any flaws in a 9MB/minute xvid stream on a standard def TV) so if your going much over that I suggest re-encoding with a better codec or a lower bitrate (or possibly multipass encoding). You may find that mJpeg is just a poor performer on your system, video chips are pretty muchy not going to be optimized for it and it involves decoding each frame seperately so despite being pretty primitive it can still be fairly expensive (processor wise).

As for uploading all your videos there should be no need. If you uploaded one then we could experiment and send you a small virtual dub config file which you could use to encode all the rest yourself.

 

[paugie]

As for uploading all your videos there should be no need. If you uploaded one then we could experiment and send you a small virtual dub config file which you could use to encode all the rest yourself.

yep.

as to the encoding used by the digicam, I seriously doubt it would be in MJPEG as this format uses a lot of space. MPG4 would probably be it. I suppose a quick check of the camera manual would be required.

 

[Sol]

mJpeg actually seems the most likely to me, video was probably largely an afterthought to a standard still camera and mJpeg wouldn't require a whole lot of extra hardware to impliment. Realtime mpeg compression would be extremely processor intensive for a camera. Even dedicated digital video cameras only used mpeg2 lat I heared, although it's not a market I've looked into for a while so there are probably at least one or two using mpeg4 by now...

 

[mubs]

Thanks everybody for the suggestions. I tried uploading a 35MB original twice, and it crapped out at around 30 MB each time. I'm close to exhausting my 30-day bandwidth limit, so I'll put this issue on the back burner till I can mess with it on my desktop system.

The compression is mJpeg. I had some difficulty initially finding a codec that could even play it.