How do I invert footage shot from camera mounted upside-down?

I have approximately 1 minute of important video footage which was shot
from a camera mounted upside-down. I have captured the footage
digitally using Pinnacle system and also have it on miniDV cassette. I
wish to insert the footage into a movie I'm editing, but don't know how
to get the images right-side up. Can anyone help me?

 

http://www.virtualdub.org is your hero.

-m-
--

 

Most good editors, e.g. Premiere Pro can flip video. I believe that Virtual
Dub (vDub), a free product, can do this is as well.

 

I have a similar situation where a friend's video was taken using the movie
function of a digital still camera, with the camera held vertically, instead
of horizontally. In Photoshop, for a still image, you can rotate the canvas
90 degrees CW to correct this situation for one still image. But I'm not
sure how to do this for a series of movie pictures using Vegas 5. Can any
Vegas users help with this? Thanks for your help.

 

I used to do reverse motion filming on 16mm with an upside down camera
using double perf film. Not sure why you would do that with video, save
for a Poseidon Adventure type situation.

Geary

 

I have now found the answer. With Vegas, you select the video to be rotated,
then under the "Tools" menu, select "Video", "Video Event", "Pan/Crop", then
under the heading of "Rotation", you adjust the "angle" to suit. Of course,
as a result of doing this, you end up with black bars on the left and right
sides of the picture, but at least it's the right way up! I would recommend
to people who use the video function of digital still cameras to keep the
camera in the horizontal position when shooting, even though it may, on
occasions, be tempting to tilt the camera vertically. Now I must research
how I could get rid of the black bars, perhaps zoom in on the affected
pictures?

 

Same tool: Pan/Crop. It will zoom, too.

Steve King

 

You can use the Pan/Crop window to do the zooming in as well. Keep in mind
that, not only will you lose image information from the top and bottom (120
pixels each), you will also lose detail as you're zooming in on something
that is supposed to have a fixed pixel size of 720 x 480 pixels (NTSC) or
720 x 576 (PAL).

Mike

 

In QuickTime Pro on the mac you can do this easily. Mail me if you need
details...

 

Thanks Mike, I managed to reduce to some extent the width of the black bars
on each side of the picture, the Pan / Crop feature of Vegas is certainly
very good. This movie was taken on a Nikon Coolpix S5 digital camera, and
although it was recorded in Apple format, Vegas recognized the format and I
was able to edit it without any problems. I am quite impressed with the
capabilities of Vegas.

Regards, Jim

 

Glad it worked out for you Jim.
I've been a Vegas user since version 1.0 (audio only) and remain impressed
with it to this day. There are things about it I'd like to see changed but I
don't think the perfect NLE exists. Or at least not that we can afford
One of the great things about Vegas is that you can drop almost any format
on the timeline and it'll work. Once in a while you may have to buy a codec
(I had to for my Canon still camera video as it turned out to use an MJPEG
codec for it's video clips) but that was only $20. I was playing with my
cellphone recently and Vegas recognized it's video (3gp format, I think)
with noproblems.
BTW, http://www.blue7media.com/vegas/ is a huge collection of Vegas
resources and http://tinyurl.com/knag6 is a listing of excellent newsletters
(pdf format) you can download.

Mike