Whether you’re bringing in vertical footage from your phone, looking to create a unique perspective, or just want to fix a crooked clip, it’s good to know how to rotate a video.
The good news is that it’s super easy to rotate a video.
In fact, you can do it in under a minute.
Let’s get started.
Quickly Rotate a Video
Download a free trial of Camtasia to quickly and easily flip and rotate your video
How to rotate a video with Camtasia
Time needed: 1 minute
Recording your video the wrong direction isn’t the end of the world. Rather than start all over again, use the rotation properties to rotate your video and save time in long run.
- Open a video editing program
Choose one that is simple to use. Rotating is a straightforward task, even if you’ve never edited a video before. Camtasia lets you try editing videos for free.
- Find the video you want to rotate
Click “Import Media” and browse to find the video you want. You can grab a clip from your computer, camera, or network. Click “Open” to add it to your media bin. Hint: Need to get large video files from your smartphone? The free TechSmith Fuse app can send them directly to Camtasia via your wireless connection.
- Get it ready to edit
Drag your video from the media bin to your timeline.
- Rotate your video
Click on the video in the large preview pane. In the center of the video, you’ll see two hollow circles. Hover over the circle on the right until your cursor turns into a rotation symbol. Click this symbol and move your mouse to tilt your video.
That’s all! Pretty quick, eh? If you want to get fancy, try these tips:
For more precise rotation, click-and-hold the rotation symbol and move your mouse near the outer edge of your video. Now you have a wider radius for more accuracy in your rotation movements.
This is especially helpful when you are rotating video from a smartphone or iPad/tablet that was taken just slightly askew from horizontal.
Have a specific angle in mind? Type in the degrees (no need to rotate by hand!). Select the video in the preview pane, then click the “Properties” button on the right. Under the “Rotation” heading, the “Z” axis is where you enter the number of degrees.
Hint: Put in 90 or 270 if you want to rotate vertical footage to be horizontal, or 180 if you want to rotate it upside down.
Especially if you’re turning a horizontal video into a vertical one, you might want to crop your clip after rotating it. Learn how in this video tutorial.
Bonus tip: Fill the space
Maybe you don’t want to rotate it, but you do want it to play in a horizontal space after recording vertically.
One trick that I like to do, is to duplicate the layer, and scale the background video up until it completely fills the space.
Then, either add a simple blur effect from inside the annotations tab – or adjust the opacity down to 25% to really make that top layer pop.
And just FYI this works in reverse too! Maybe you wanted to make a video for Instagram TV where the vertical video is the norm or even on YouTube where lots of people like to watch vertically on their phones.
Go into your project settings, reverse the 1920×1080 aspect ratio so it’s now 1080×1920 and rotate your video to fit!
Ready to start rotating video?
Camtasia lets you rotate videos horizontally, vertically, and everything in between, not to mention ‘flip’ them upside down and backward.
Quickly Rotate a Video
Download a free trial of Camtasia to quickly and easily flip and rotate your video
Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in May 2017 and has since been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness.
