How to Rotate Video Clip
Vertical phone videos usually open in the correct orientation automatically — the program reads the orientation tag in the file. Manual rotation is needed if the frame is still sideways or upside down, or if you want to rotate the image on purpose. In Bolide Movie Creator you can rotate left or right in 90-degree steps and flip (mirror) the picture horizontally or vertically.
Rotate a video step by step
-
Select the video or photo clip on the timeline, click the Operations on visual blocks button on the timeline toolbar and choose Rotate right or Rotate left. The clip turns 90 degrees.
-
Repeat until the picture has the orientation you need. If several clips are selected, all of them are rotated at once.
-
Another way: right-click the clip on the timeline and choose Rotate right or Rotate left in the menu.
- To undo the rotation, click the small effect icon in the upper right corner of the block and choose Delete this effect.
- After rotating a video by 90 or 270 degrees, there are usually two empty stripes on the left and right. To fill them with a blurred copy of the same video, right-click the clip and choose Blurred background (see Project Video Resolution and Frame Rate). You can also fill the empty space with a picture or another video: just put that clip on a track BELOW your rotated video. Remember that tracks are layered from the bottom up.
- Rotation can be combined on the same clip with flipping, cropping, pan and zoom and the Virtual Screen effect. For example, you can rotate a sideways phone video and then crop it: the crop frame already shows the rotated picture.
- To save the rotated video, click Save as Video.
How to flip (mirror) a video
- Select the video or photo clip on the timeline, click the Operations on visual blocks button on the timeline toolbar and choose Flip Horizontal (left and right swap places, as in a mirror) or Flip Vertical (top and bottom swap places). The same commands are in the right-click menu of the clip, right after Rotate right and Rotate left.
- If several clips are selected, all video and photo clips among them are flipped at once.
- To return the picture to normal, choose the same command again.
- Flipping a selfie video is a typical case: the front camera often records a mirror image, so the text in the frame reads backwards. Flip Horizontal fixes it.
- Flipping always works on what you see in the preview, even on a rotated clip: Flip Horizontal swaps the left and right sides of the picture as it is shown now.
How to turn a video upside down (180 degrees)?
Rotate it by 90 degrees twice. Or open the Effects tab (see Video Effects), select the Rotate effect and apply it to the clip with the Add selected video effect to the clip button: by default it turns the picture upside down.
Back to Video Editing Guide.
