Sometimes you may need to flip or rotate the video in a Quicktime movie. If you are shooting with the iPhone, it’s likely you’ve come across instances where you needed to change something. Some reasons for flipping and rotating are obvious, but not all of them:

1. you shot with the camera upside-down and didn’t realize
2. you shot in landscape want to display portrait
3. you needed to shoot using a mirror to have access to a tricky scene

One thing you don’t want to have to do with your movie is to decode and reencode it to complete this operation. Fortunately the QT container structure allows this information to be changed without modifying the stream itself.

Using Quicktime Pro on Win XP, you simply open the movie file and navigate to the dropdown under the ‘window’ menu item. That’s where you’ll see ‘show movie properties.’ You can also use the keyboard shortcut CTRL+J. This will open the movie property box where you will see the elements that make up the file. There is a container element, a video track, and an audio track.

In this case we want to modify the video track, so we click on it and notice that it brings up a set of tabs. Clicking on ‘Visual Settings’  will allow a number of operations to be performed including flipping and rotating the video.

Once you have the proper orientation, just use ‘save as’ to save the file with the new settings and a new name. The save operation is quick because the stream itself doesn’t need modification in this instance.

If you work with Quicktime movies on the PC, Quicktime Pro- at $29.95 is a great bargain and a very hand tool to have around. You can see this demo in action on the VideoDawgZ YouTube channel: