Sideways Orion

Rotating a video April 16, 2013

Imagine this. It’s Friday evening. You’ve just finished putting the kids to bed. You were planning to post the pre-class assignment for Monday’s class this afternoon, but your grad student had a dissertation crisis so you spent the afternoon being a mentor. None of the undergrads would do the assignment on a Friday evening anyway, so that was a much better use of your time. Now, you sit down at your computer and start assembling the materials.

There’s the video file with the demo, the set of questions, a short slide show, and the set of resources for further investigation. Great, looks like everything is here. You should be done in time for the evening news.

You start by uploading the video, which gives you a cute litte screenshot…

wait…

why is the image sideways??

You start to preview the video, and you realize something terrible.

That nice video camera you borrowed from the media center because you wanted a nicer video than the one you get from your smart phone does not know what “up” is. You were holding it sideways, and now you have a sideways video, and the demo lab won’t be open again until 8 AM Monday.

Before you start ransacking your house for things ou can use to re-create the demo at home, or think bout trying to use powerpoint to create an animation, relax. YouTube has a handle on this.

Start by logging in to your youtube account. (This is also your Google account, which is handy if your school has “gone google.”) Click the upload button at the top (the one you’ve clicked by mistake a couple of times because its right next to the search bar). Drag your video onto the upload area. While it is actually uploading, give it a title, description, set the permissions, etc.

Once it has uploaded, go to https://www.youtube.com/editor. It should look something like this:

The YouTube editor

Start by creating a new project: click the drop-down in the upper right, select New Project, and give it a nice name.

Click the drop-down arrow to create a new project.

On the left, mouse over the video file you need to fix. A plus sign appears next to the title. Click it to add the video to the edit window below.

Click the + that appears next to the title when you mouse over the video clip.

Mouse over the clip in the video editor window. Several options appear, including rotate.

Select the rotate option

Click it and a new window appears so you can choose which way to rotate it. you can even click the direction button twice to turn the video upside down. Note there are also options to edit the clip and add titles at the top.

Click the arrow buttons to rotate the video. You can also edit thing like brightness and effects, or add titles using the tabs at the top.

When you’re done, click the publish button at the top right, near the project title. Double check the permissions to make sure your students will be able to view it.

The one downside to this is that it is now a youtube video, not a local file you can upload, download, or watch offline.