The unlevel horizon is giving me motion sickness.
October 8, 2009 6:27 PM   Subscribe

How can I rotate videos made with a Sony Handycam HDR-XR500V just a little to make the horizon level? The format the Sony makes is .m2ts. Just learning to use Pinnacle Studio 12. No success googling. Thanks.
posted by wsg to Technology (7 answers total)
 
I don't know Pinnacle Studio, so I can't give you an answer there. But I'd be surprised if there was a free rotate option available. I don't recall one in Avid XPress, Final Cut, or Adobe Premier.

The reason being that, if you rotate a frame of video, there is now picture that is cut off by the frame, and frame that must be filled in. The new video image is basically non-rectangular. So you'll need to rotate it, then crop it down, to fill the whole frame with video.

Can Pinnacle export/import to sequential images that you could edit in Photoshop? That's how I'd go about it.
posted by Netzapper at 6:39 PM on October 8, 2009


Yeah, rotating video is going to be a highly intensive process.

It might be the kind of thing you could use linux command line tools to do, but I don't know any.

Basically you'd need to pipe the video > frame grabber > rotator > cropper/resizer > reassemble frames into video > recompress into mpg/avi. But at 24/30/60 frames per second for video, you are talking about devoting a weekend to it.
posted by gjc at 7:02 PM on October 8, 2009


You can do free rotation with the Avisynth rotate plugin, make a fake AVI with MakeAVIs from the ffdshow-tryouts package, and then serve that fake AVI to Pinnacle.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 7:55 PM on October 8, 2009


Virtualdub will do this for you for free but you will face the problem of then having to crop and resize to get anything useful as mentioned above.
posted by merocet at 8:03 PM on October 8, 2009


It might be the kind of thing you could use linux command line tools to do, but I don't know any.

The ImageMagick toolset could be automated to do the rotate and crop. VLC, mplayer, or ffmpeg could do the framegrab and the reassembly. Keep in mind, though, that you'll have either multi-generation losses as you decompress, recompress to JPEG, and then decompress/recompress to video. Or, you'll fill up your harddrive with uncompressed images (TIFF).
posted by Netzapper at 9:06 PM on October 8, 2009


Response by poster: Wow, thanks all!
posted by wsg at 10:42 PM on October 8, 2009


In future, do yourself a favor and get a tripod with a level in it. You should be able to score one for $50 or less online. You *can* do any of the things folks have mentioned above, but you'll make yourself nuts in the long run doing it every time.
posted by fairytale of los angeles at 11:03 PM on October 8, 2009


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