I have a 1080x1920 video taken with a phone. The phone was horizontal at the time, so viewing the video shows a vertical format with the image “sideways”. I have a version of it converted to edit-friendly format. What I want to do now is, as a minimum, rotate it to be horizontal format. Ideally, I’d like to also zoom and crop it, as well as apply a small tilt to correct the camera angle.
I have created a project with a horizontal 1920x1080 format. I’ve imported the video as a clip and dragged it onto the timeline. I’ve then used the Transform effect on that clip to get it looking exactly as I want in the project monitor window. However, when I render it, i get the tilted and zoomed image… in a vertical stripe in the horizontal window. I also tried using Translate before Transform, to do the 90 degree rotation, then Transform to fine-tune the angle. Still no luck.
I tried the Rotate (Deprecated) plugin but, apart from being wary of using such things, I still couldn’t get it right :{
I’m pretty sure I’m missing something obvious here - anyone any idea what that might be?
If your phone didn’t set the orientation correctly, for a case like this you’re probably best off rotating them in something like LosslessCut before importing.
What version of Kdenlive are you using, how did you install it and on what OS?
I am confused by your description of what you did to get it into the desired orientation, and that it looks correct in the project monitor but not in the rendered video. Please post screenshots of your project for further investigation.
I didn’t get too bogged down in that, mainly because if you’re importing 1080x1920 video into a 1920x1080 project, and want to use it as that, with minimum distortion / loss of quality, then you’re already in trouble.
But then you also already might be - depending on what your camera did with pixel aspect ratio when it recorded it as the wrong orientation.
When I’ve been given footage in the wrong orientation, the following FFMPEG commands which do a straight transpose in FFMPEG have sorted it. Might work, depending on how the orientation bit was set in the original. Worth a try:
First off, thanks for all the replies. Even if they didn’t help directly, I learnt from them - and I suspect I will be doing a lot more with KDEnlive in the future, so that’s useful.
Problem solved! I now feel like a right twit. There were actually 3 issues but the worst has to be this: On the machine I was using, VLC hadn’t been used for a couple of years. It seems the last time it was used it was set to rotate the image 90 degrees. I didn’t realise it was VLC because when I first checked out the clip, it was on another machine where, surprise, it played perfectly.
Secondly, when loading the original clip, I got a message that it was variable frame rate and this could lead to editing issues. Would I like the clip converted to an edit-friendly format? Of course, I said yes… and left it running overnight… I then exported the converted video and started the next stage by loading that. Not clever, it seems.
So I started again from scratch. This time, I didn’t get the message about VFR - I’d updated KDEnlive in the meantime and I assumed that VFR was no longer a problem. But still no horizontal video.
However, in the meantime, I thought I’d have a go with Openshot. (It was the fact that it also seemed to produce vertical videos which made me think that I should look outside the video editor. Which is when I found the VLC debacle.) I noticed that, in the filter parameters, there was a little graph by the side of some of them. Right clicking on one of them brought up a drop-down menu… and then the penny dropped. Back to KDEnlive and, oh look, there’s a drop-down in the transform effect, set to “Linear”. Set it to “Constant” and all’s well. So I felt a twit for the second time
I had a few other minor bumps on the learning curve but I now have renders which are precisely as I wanted them.
