How to rotate a video that is sideways

Cut by Zaweba straightens a sideways video in a few clicks. Open the clip, go to the Filters tab and choose rotate 90, 180 or 270 degrees until the picture is upright, then save it with one of the Convert tab's presets. The new file plays the right way up on any phone, computer or television.

The app is free software under the EULA and works offline on Windows, so nothing is uploaded.

Why videos end up sideways

Phones record a note in the file saying which way up they were held, and most players read it. Some don't. A clip can look fine on the phone and appear on its side on a laptop, a smart television or an older player. Cameras held at an angle, screen recordings of a turned tablet and clips passed through messaging apps can all end up turned.

Before you change anything, it helps to look. Cut's Details tab lists the video's properties, and rotation is one of them. If a rotation value is shown there, the file is asking players to turn it, and a player that ignores the request is why it looks wrong.

Turning the picture the right way

Open the video by dragging it onto the window, using Open, or picking it from recent files. Step through a few frames so you can see which way the picture needs to turn.

Go to the Filters tab and choose a rotation. Rotate 90 turns it a quarter turn, 270 turns it a quarter turn the other way, and 180 turns it upside down, which is the fix for a camera that was mounted upside down. If you pick the wrong quarter, just pick the other one.

There is also a flip. That is for a mirrored picture, such as some front camera recordings where writing reads backwards. Flipping and rotating are different jobs, so use flip only when text or a familiar face looks reversed.

If you'd like to see the change before saving, View, then Show the filters in the preview, shows the filters live on the picture.

Now go to the Convert tab and pick a preset by purpose, such as For WhatsApp or For YouTube 1080p, or Best quality if you want to keep as much detail as possible. The estimated size and the encoder are shown before you start, and Cut uses your graphics card's encoder when it has one.

Trimming at the same time

A sideways clip often has a few seconds of fumbling at the start too. Mark in with I and out with O around the part you want, or mark an unwanted stretch and press Delete. When you convert, only the kept parts are saved, with the rotation applied, so tidying and turning happen in one pass.

Avoiding common slips

Rotate before you crop. A crop drawn on a sideways picture won't make sense once it turns. Fix the orientation first, then look at the framing.

Think about where the video is going. A tall phone video turned the right way up is still tall, which is ideal for a phone and leaves black sides on a television. That is normal and doesn't mean the rotation went wrong.

If a whole folder of clips came from the same camera held the same way, you don't have to do each by hand. Set the rotation, then add many files at once from the Batch tab; the current filters, other than a crop, are applied to them, and the queue carries on in the background, even after a restart.

When Cut is the right tool

Rotating doesn't need a timeline editor. Cut by Zaweba is built for exactly this kind of quick fix, and it runs well on older PCs thanks to a low-spec mode that switches on by itself on modest machines. Open, turn, save, and the video is ready to send.