Rotate Video to Fix Sideways Clips
How do you fix a sideways or upside-down video?
Fix a sideways video with a quarter turn, rotate it by a custom angle, or flip the picture horizontally or vertically. Preview the orientation before exporting and check any background exposed by an angled rotation. Rotation changes the picture orientation, not the order of playback. Use Reverse Video when you want the action to run backwards.
Cost: Free to use. File size and usage limits apply.
How to rotate a video
Upload one video
Click Upload a video to rotate or drop the file on the preview. MP4, MOV, M4V, WebM, MKV, AVI, MPEG/MPG and OGV files up to 200 MB work. Videos you already uploaded in another tool are listed under Uploads.
Turn it in quarter steps
+90 turns the picture 90° clockwise, -90 turns it counter-clockwise. Each click adds to the current angle, so two clicks make 180°. 180 fixes an upside-down clip directly, and 0 sets the angle back to zero.
Fine-tune or mirror if needed
Drag the slider (-180° to 180° in 1° steps) or type a value into the deg field. Positive values turn clockwise. Flip H mirrors left to right, Flip V top to bottom.
Apply the rotation
The preview follows the angle and the flips as you change them; press Play to watch it move. Apply rotation stays greyed out while the angle is 0° (or a full 360°) and no flip is switched on.
Check the result, then download
When the job finishes, the preview switches to the processed file with normal player controls. Watch it once, then click Download. Continue editing takes you back to the original with your settings kept.
Rotation settings explained
- +90 and -90
- Quarter turns swap width and height: a 1920 × 1080 px landscape clip becomes 1080 × 1920 px portrait, and the reverse. Nothing is cropped and no borders are added. The preview fits the turned clip into the player frame, and the saved file is exactly that portrait or landscape video, with no bars around it. This is the fix for a phone clip that plays lying on its side.
- 180
- Turns the picture upside down or back. Width and height stay the same.
- Slider and deg field
- Set any angle, for example 2° or 3° to level a tilted horizon. Values beyond the slider range are fine: 270° gives the same result as -90°. An angle that is not a multiple of 90° makes the frame larger so no corner is cut off. An MP4 clip with 1280 × 720 px rotated by 10° becomes 1386 × 932 px; at 45° it becomes about 1416 × 1416 px. The picture is also resampled, which softens it slightly.
- Flip H and Flip V
- Mirroring, not rotation. Use Flip H when text or logos in the video read backwards, for example in some front-camera recordings. Turning on both flips gives the same picture as a 180° rotation. Flips combine freely with any angle, and the saved video matches what the preview shows.
- Background
- Colour picker, black (
#000000) by default. It fills the empty corners created by a custom angle and has no effect on 90°, 180° or 270° turns. Transparent backgrounds are not possible. To get rid of the corners, rotate first and then trim the edges with Crop Video.
What happens to format, quality and sound
The tool turns the actual pixels instead of storing the change as an orientation flag. The rotated picture therefore does not depend on a player reading that flag. Phone clips with a stored orientation start from the orientation you see in the preview; the finished file has no rotation flag. The container stays the same: a MOV stays a MOV and an MP4 stays an MP4.
Because the picture changes, the video is always re-encoded. MP4, MOV and M4V files are written as H.264 at CRF 22 with 8-bit colour, and the audio track is copied unchanged. HEVC, ProRes or 10-bit HDR recordings therefore come back as standard 8-bit H.264.
Other formats use FFmpeg's standard encoder for that container: VP9 with Opus for WebM, H.264 with Vorbis for MKV, MPEG-4 Part 2 with MP3 for AVI, MPEG-1 with MP2 for MPEG files and Theora with Vorbis for OGV. The audio is re-encoded in these cases. Encoding settings differ between containers; AVI, MPEG and OGV can lose more fine detail than MP4, MOV, MKV or WebM.
If the source has several audio tracks, only one is kept. The tool does not remove metadata, so tags such as a GPS location that some phones write into the file can be carried over.
Formats and limits
- Input formats
- MP4, MOV, M4V, WebM, MKV, AVI, MPEG/MPG, OGV
- Output format
- Same container as the input
- Maximum file size
- 200 MB per video
- Files per job
- 1
- Processing
- On our servers with FFmpeg, without an external service. A job can run for up to 15 minutes. VP9 encoding for WebM can take more processing time.
- Watermark
- None
- Storage
- Uploads and results are deleted automatically after 48 hours for guests and after 30 days for free accounts. Paid plans can keep files longer.
Frequently asked questions
How do I rotate a MOV file 90 degrees?
Upload the MOV, click +90 for a clockwise turn or -90 for counter-clockwise, then click Apply rotation. You get a MOV back with width and height swapped, H.264 video and the original audio track.
Why is the rotated file bigger or smaller than the original?
Rotating re-encodes the video, so the size depends on the new encoding, not on the old file. Phones often record in efficient HEVC; the same clip as H.264 at CRF 22 can be larger. High-bitrate camera files and screen recordings can come out smaller. To reduce the size afterwards, use Compress Video.
Does rotating lower the quality?
Re-encoding uses lossy compression and can remove detail; the visible change depends on the source. Custom angles also resample the picture, which can soften edges. Quarter turns avoid that extra resampling but still re-encode the video. Compare fine textures and gradients in the result, particularly for AVI, MPEG and OGV output.
Can this tool play a video backwards?
No. Rotation changes which way the picture faces, not the order of the frames. To make a clip run in reverse, use Reverse Video.
Can I remove location data while rotating?
Not in this tool. After rotating, run the result through Compress Video: Strip metadata in its Advanced encoder section is switched on by default. The rotated file is already in Uploads, so you don't need to upload it again. This re-encodes the video a second time.