{"id":45,"date":"2009-09-20T21:37:25","date_gmt":"2009-09-20T20:37:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rwec.co.uk\/blog\/?p=45"},"modified":"2010-03-01T18:29:45","modified_gmt":"2010-03-01T18:29:45","slug":"rotating-digital-camera-videos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rwec.co.uk\/blog\/2009\/09\/rotating-digital-camera-videos\/","title":{"rendered":"A script for rotating digital camera videos!"},"content":{"rendered":"

A while ago, after flickr launched the ability to upload “long photos”<\/a>, I shot a clip of waves crashing on the beach, and wanted to share it. But there was a catch: being taken on a compact camera, it felt perfectly natural to turn it upright, and shoot the video in a “portrait” orientation. So, like a lot of my photos, it needed turning 90\u00b0 clockwise – but unlike a photo, there was no obvious way to do this.<\/p>\n

I hunted around at the time, and found that while plenty of players can transform video during playback<\/em> (my copy of VLC<\/a> seems to have got stuck, and now rotates everything<\/em>!), few video editing tools could save a rotated video. I finally managed it with a power-utility which required me to import the video, tweak a large number of output options I didn’t understand, and hope the result wasn’t too mangled. Hardly ideal.<\/p>\n

But while reading up on it, I discovered that most digital cameras – including my Casio Ezilim EX-Z1050 – shoot videos in a format called “Motion JPEG” or “MJPEG”, which is basically a bunch of JPEG pictures stuck together. So if I could extract the images from the video, they should be easy to rotate, and all I’d need to do was stick them together again…<\/p>\n

Well, yesterday I was playing with lossless image rotation using jpegtran<\/a>, and then managed to find MJPEG tools<\/a> – a bunch of commandline tools for manipulating MJPEG data, actually designed for video capture utilities. And guess what? It works!<\/strong> I can split the AVI file from my camera into a bunch of JPEGs, rotate them, and stitch them back together, with minimal loss of quality!<\/p>\n

Oddly, the biggest sticking point was sound – the mjpegtools utilities can’t see the sound stream in my source files. In fact, the only utility I could was FFmpeg<\/a>, which at over 10 times the size of all the other tools put together is like the proverbial sledgehammer to the sound streams nut.<\/p>\n

So, with my meagre Windows batch-scripting skills, I’ve put together something which might, just about, be useful, and called it VidRotate<\/a><\/strong>. Go forth, download!<\/strong> But beware – I make absolutely no<\/em> guarantee that it won’t blow your computer up at this stage…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A while ago, after flickr launched the ability to upload “long photos”, I shot a clip of waves crashing on the beach, and wanted to share it. But it seems there is no easy way of rotating a video to sit upright – so, to cut a long story short, I wrote one: welcome to VidRotate!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[41,44,43,45,40,42,39,38],"class_list":["post-45","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-avi","tag-digital-camera","tag-flickr","tag-longphoto","tag-mjpeg","tag-photography","tag-script","tag-video","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rwec.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rwec.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rwec.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rwec.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rwec.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/rwec.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":103,"href":"https:\/\/rwec.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45\/revisions\/103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rwec.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rwec.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rwec.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}