Rotating Video Any Amount

If you need to rotate video a small amount to correct a camera tilt or create a special effect, you can't do it with iMovie or QuickTime Player. However, you can use Keynote to rotate video. This involves a small Keynote project with just the video, plus a rotation, and then an export. You need to make adjustments to avoid leaving blank corners.

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Video Transcript: Yesterday I showed you how to rotate video ninety degrees in case it's in the incorrect orientation. But what if you want to rotate it less than ninety degrees like forty-five degrees or just two or three degrees to correct video that's at a slight angle. Well, you can't do that in iMovie. You can't do that in Photos. You can't do it in QuickTime Player. You really can't do it with any video software that you have that comes with your Mac. You can do it with professional software like Final Cut or Adobe Premiere. But what if you want to do it with just what you've got.
Well, you can use Keynote to do it. So here is some video, just some normal video. It's 1080 shot with an iPhone. I want to go and just rotate it slightly. So, to do that I'm going to first open up Keynote. Now I know that the video itself is 1080. So I'm going to create a new presentation. It doesn't really matter what template I use but best probably better to use the black or the white one. I'll use black. I will clear off the stuff that's on the default template. I don't need that text. 
I'm going to go to Document and I'm going to take the slide size and set it to Custom to make sure I get it the exact size of the video. Now when I rotate video it's going to cut parts off because of the way it rotates. We'll see. So you may want to actually shrink the video. So instead of 1080 I'm going to do the new version as 720. So 1280 by 720. You can see, here in the window, I've got that area to fill. I'm going to drag and drop the video into it. You can see now it shrinks to fit right in there. So it's shrinking the video.
Now I want to rotate it. So to rotate it I'm going to go over to the sidebar here with the video selected and I'm going to go to the Format sidebar here. Then I'm going to go to Arrange. Here's where I can rotate it. I can set an angle. So let's try negative four. I want to actually go the other way so let's try four, there. You can see I rotated it a little bit. Now here you can see what I'm talking about it being cutoff. So in order for it to not cutoff this little piece here and this little piece here, just because of the logic of how when you rotate something it's not going to fit into the same rectangle, I'm going to have to enlarge this video. 
So I'm going to drag up on any of these handles. Drag up or down or whatever to scale. I want to scale just enough so that when I position the video it actually fills the entire rectangle. You don't have to. But I certainly think the video looks better if you don't have these little corners that are just blank. So that's why I wanted to do 720. Now I don't have to worry about it. If I was doing it even more extreme rotation, of course, I'd have larger gaps to fill here in the corners.
So I get it to where I want and now all I need to do is to Export it. I'll go to File and Export to QuickTime. It will bring up the Export Your Presentation control here. I don't want to mess with these. I've got just this one slide so it really doesn't matter if it's self playing or what. Go to next slide and Go to next build doesn't matter because I don't have any other slides or builds. I have the format here but I've set everything to be 720 so I want to leave it at 720 and I'll go to next. Then it will allow me to Save it out. I will save it out here as untitled M4V and it will export the movie out.
Alright, now that is done. We'll hide Keynote. We can see here is the new video. So the original video looks like this. The new video is going to look like this. You can see, of course, it's smaller because I made it 720 but it has been rotated. So you can see I actually rotated it a little bit too much and now the tilt of the line here of the shore is actually rotated to the left whereas here, in the original, you can see it tilted a little bit to the right. 
So that's how you can rotate video using Keynote on your Mac.

Rotating Video Any Amount

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