No good way to convert portrait <> Landscape !?

SonoMan

Newbie Joined: Nov 23, 2018 01:01 Messages: 8 Offline

Solved by

Mar 11, 2021 19:56

Yes, I know you can rotate it in the clip window, but that is not a good solution IMHO because when you go into pan/zoom, it is still in the original orientation. That is tedious to impossible to use.

This comes up all the time. Not all cameras are aware of portrait versus landscape. If you turn the camera 90 degrees to orient the shot the way that makes sense, there ought to be an easy way to bring this into PowerDirector and handle it as if it was recorded explicitly as portrait or landscape.

The only way I have found to effectively deal with this is to bring my video into PD or WIndoes Video Editor, flip it, and then render a new file altogether. Then I create another PD project to bring in that converted file. It really shouldn't be this difficult. What am I missing? I see this quietion has come up many times over the years, and I don't see any good solutions on any of the previous threads.

Esseff

Member Location: Germany Joined: Oct 10, 2020 16:47 Messages: 69 Offline

Mar 12, 2021 02:41

Quote Yes, I know you can rotate it in the clip window, but that is not a good solution IMHO because when you go into pan/zoom, it is still in the original orientation. That is tedious to impossible to use.

This comes up all the time. Not all cameras are aware of portrait versus landscape. If you turn the camera 90 degrees to orient the shot the way that makes sense, there ought to be an easy way to bring this into PowerDirector and handle it as if it was recorded explicitly as portrait or landscape.

The only way I have found to effectively deal with this is to bring my video into PD or WIndoes Video Editor, flip it, and then render a new file altogether. Then I create another PD project to bring in that converted file. It really shouldn't be this difficult. What am I missing? I see this quietion has come up many times over the years, and I don't see any good solutions on any of the previous threads.

+1

Had to deal with this too recently. Was really awkward to work with the rotated clip. Didn't occur to me to render it separately and then re-import that. It's a good enough workaround but a better way of doing it would be great.

Warry

Senior Contributor Location: The Netherlands Joined: Oct 13, 2014 11:42 Messages: 853 Offline

Mar 12, 2021 06:16

I agree that a rotate left or right function would be great to have. Next to the rotate the clip should also be made full screen automatically (which is not what you get when rotating the clip in the preview screen.

I like to avoid making intermediate clips as much as possible. So, what I do until PD has this feature is:

load the clip into the timeline, and say NO the message about changing the video ratio.

select the clip and then from the Tools menu select crop/zoom/pan

In the right of the screen you will find a rotation value; click on the numer (usually 0) en set it to 90 or -90 depending on the rotation and click enter. In the smallpreview screen in the right top corner you see the result.

now use one of the white squares in the lines around the clip and drag the line inwards to get it aligned with the border of the clip. If you recorded with the 16:9 or 9:16 ratio, you will see that the other lines will also touh the clip border.

No click OK

Now, using many of the other features "understand" that you have rotated the clip. Some don't. That is why this rotation function would be great.