S230 (IXUS v3) - rotate avi files ?

[zkosty]

It is nice you can rotate (autorotate) pictures in the camera or computer. But is the same possible with the AVI movies?

I tried to take a movie on my S230 with camera rotated, and later I found no way to fix the orientation!!!!! :(
Ended up rotating the whole laptop !!!! :-) :-) :-)

Is there a better way?
(I am pretty sure that the camera can't do it but maybe some software?)

Thank for help!

zkosty

[dance_crew]

try 2 use adobe premiere for solving the rotation :P

[lord.hypnos]

dance_crew wrote:
try 2 use adobe premiere for solving the rotation :P


If you want to pay several hundred just to rotate your movies buy Premiere, but for the cheapest (free) way, download VirtualDub.

Open your AVI. Choose Video>Filters...>Add>Rotate.
Select 90º left or right or 180º, click OK twice.

See this other thread for instructions on how to reencode the file:
http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=2407

[zkosty]

Great!!!
Thank you. Virtual Dub is really a cool software, it can rotate the movies and much more! After some long time looking around on the internet, it is the first free video editing utility that allowed me to save the files in original quality without any coding/decoding, provided I didn't do more changes than cutting-pasting movies. (for rotating, of course, I needed to do coding/decoding). VirtualDub is also really fast! Too bad they don't make it for Linux.
By the way, somewhere on these pages I saw that people recommend the Morgan M-JPEG codec for the videos from S230 cameras. Well, I found another codec on http://www.mainconcept.com/downloads.shtml and this one is completely free - well, the decoding part only. Works perfect.
zkosty

[bikeracer]

I also do use VirtualDub to rotate my G1 .avi files.

But it always seems to me that I get a lot of loss in image quality with this codec: PICmjpeg.

Of course, I can screw quality up to 20 (the maximum offered by this codec) - but this also results in a maximum of filesize i.e. about 20 MB for a 3 or 4 MB G1.avi.

As much as I understand the principle of a MJPEG file, wouldn't it be possible to get a LOSSLESSLY rotated file?

For example, ACDSEE makes losslessly transformed .jpg files.
And as MJPEG is only a collection of .jpg files (15 per second), this seems very likely that somewhere out there is a little coder guy who already did this job??

I'd really appreciate this very much because I of course only want to archive my rotated files, and therefore wonder if this .avi rotating by not losing any quality has already been implemented by anyone out there.

[lord.hypnos]

bikeracer wrote:
But it always seems to me that I get a lot of loss in image quality with this codec: PICmjpeg.

Of course, I can screw quality up to 20 (the maximum offered by this codec) - but this also results in a maximum of filesize i.e. about 20 MB for a 3 or 4 MB G1.avi.
...
I'd really appreciate this very much because I of course only want to archive my rotated files, and therefore wonder if this .avi rotating by not losing any quality has already been implemented by anyone out there.

If you are planning to archive your videos why not encode using a true video codec. MJPEG is used because it can compress the individual frames very quickly (used mostly for video captures from TV etc). Use something like DivX or XviD if you want the best quality and smallest filesizes. By definition JPEG is lossy, and by bumping up the quality does nothing if the source itself was already compressed.

You'll also notice that the audio is a PCM uncompressed stream. Compress that using LAME ABR and you'll save some space there as well.

[bikeracer]

>lord.hypnos:

Of course, you are absolutely right: using DivX you get the best "archive".

But there is one point I didn't tell you in the first posting: As these .avis are 15 fps ones, I have them run through "MotionPerfect 4.2", which makes 25 fps out of them, which makes a great improve of fun when watching them (your eyes don't feel insulted any more).

MotionPerfect CAN NOT deal with DivX!

That's the most imortant reason, why I want to archive all .avis in MJPEG-format.

Another reason is', that editing DivX .avis in AdobePremiere or Ulead's VideoEditor (VE is the one I prefer) is not that accurate and fast compared to using MJPEG-.avis as the input file format.

I am convinced of the theory, that it MUST be possible to rotate the .avis as they come from the G1 without any loss of quality (as ACDSee does it with .jpgs) while at the same time not grow them to twice, three times the file size they had before rotating.

I found two tools ("AVIExtract" and "Platypus Animator" ) which could help to manage this. But I have to try, just downloaded them until now.

[lord.hypnos]

bikeracer wrote:
>lord.hypnos:
MotionPerfect CAN NOT deal with DivX!


I downloaded MotionPerfect to verify this, and it had no problems encoding to or opening DivX-encoded AVIs (DivX4 and/or Divx 5.0.2 Pro).

As far as the rotation goes, I asked on another forum, and got the response that nothing (at least known to them) can rotate video without having to reencode. However, there are several players that will let you rotate inside the player during playback.

I'd imagine that you could output the video to its individual jpeg frames. Use a batch convert to rotate all of the frames, and then you could put the frames back into video, but that seems more trouble than it's worth.

Regarding editing in Premiere (I can't speak for Ulead's VideoEditor), I can't notice any difference between editing MJPEG vs DivX (or any other codec for that matter), unless the keyframes have been set to some huge interval, but if you encode them yourself you shouldn't have that problem.

The reason why your files are growing in size is because they are not starting out at the best quality. On a scale of 20 they are probably somewhere around 10. When you try to reencode higher than this, the file size grows because it is trying to compress even the artifacts that occurred from the first encoding.

You do realize that these are just captures from a digital camera and not a digital camcorder? If I was expecting great quality I definitely wouldn't be using a digital camera. You're going to have to make some sacrifices.

[bikeracer]

Hi there!

>no problems encoding to or opening DivX-encoded AVIs (DivX4 and/or Divx 5.0.2 Pro)

Great to hear that there is a chance to somewhen make it work with DivX - but me (on my notebook) and a friend of mine (on his desktop pc) aren't able to run a DivX 5.0.2 coded (not the pro version) video through MotionPerfect - it's just a fact. You beg, I'd never use anything other than DivX, if I could! :)

>another forum, and got the response that nothing (at least known to them) can rotate video

Hey, thanks for your effort!!
And obviously there's a place for someone to be the first coding such a tool!

>individual jpeg frames. Use a batch convert to rotate ....

That's just the way I did it today.
To verify the impact of using .bmp or .jpg format when exporting/rotating the separated frames, I played around about 3 hours with all possible combinations that came to my mind.

Despite of some stange changes in brightness (no matter if using Windows MediaPlayer or ZoomPlayer) when task switching to the desktop and the WMP / ZP it shows NO difference. So one can work on .jpg or .bmp files before re-creating an .avi - the result is the same.
Some values vor a Pentium-III CPU @ 1 GHz:

export images (450 bmp) 2 min
export .wav 0:10 min
rotate all 3 min
(convert to .jpg (80 %) 2 min)
(copy to work dir 3 min)
import images (450) 0:01 min
import .wav 0:01 min
create new .avi (q 17) 1:10 min

Which means ~ 6:30 min for each .avi to be rotated.

VirtualDub does the job (create a new .avi) in about 4 seconds (plus rotating/filters/sound: direct stream copy).

So I'll stick to VirtualDub and it's batch processing capability, because there is no difference with quality factor 17 (set in PICvideoMJPEG) compared to manually rotating/re-creating such an .avi. That also holds true for the file size.

My initial claim seems only to be valid if one heavily uses filters (levels/sharpen) that may create a noisy pictures. Obviously I stepped into this trap. ;)


>Regarding editing
Well - it depends on one's system... As I work on a notebook, I definitely have such experiences depending on what codec is doing the job.
For pure editing MJPEG seems to be the best choice. To my opinion, DivX is the big winner regarding publishing (especially on the net).


>the file size grows because it is trying to compress even the artifacts that occurred from the first encoding.
Yess sir - I confirm that with having said the above filter thing.

>You do realize that these are just captures from a digital camera and not a digital camcorder?
Of course. :) :)
I just try to make the best of the things I own - and I for my little hobby filming don't think I need a camcorder, when there are such fantastic possibilities using good software (MotionPerfect is really worth that name).
And look - I'm more into mountainbiking than filming - just having fun with both not trying to be a new Spielberg. ;)

This is a forum to keep an eye on - knowy people around here!!

One last question: Which players can rotate their streams internally? I think, ZoomPlayer lacks this capability?

[lord.hypnos]

Converting the frames to BMP and then back to JPEG is not "losslessly" rotating. BMP is a lossless format. You are basically doing the same as using Virtualdub's rotate filter and convert back using MJPEG. The only way that you could "losslessly" rotate it would be to pull the original JPEGs from the avi, rotate them, and then readd the frames back to a video format without having to recompress them.

I'm glad to see that you saw the light and went back to Vdub. Why spend 6 minutes when you can achieve the same results in Vdub in less time. If you want MJPEG just use the the rotate filter and encode back to mjpeg. You are correct that MJPEG is great for editing, but there are many other codecs out there that give better quality with much smaller filesizes. MJPEG shines in its use for real-time capturing with minimal CPU usage

I'm not sure how much you want to get into this, but there is a utility called Avisynth that will allow you to do many things that Vdub cannot. But you have to use scripts. No point and click.

As for Divx not working in MotionPerfect, you might want to look into that. That may be an indication that there is something wrong (or you may just need to update your software).

If you are interested in learning more about encoding and cleaning up video sources check here:
http://arstechnica.infopop.net/OpenTopic/page?a=tpc&s=50009562&f=67909965&m=5460954161
http://arstechnica.infopop.net/OpenTopic/page?q=Y&a=tpc&s=50009562&f=67909965&m=2100951281

[fleminga]

I followed the directions-they worked great. But I am unable to save the rotated videos to my computer...message keeps telling me they are in use by something else...how do I close the sideways one and just save the newly rotated to my computer??

Any help would be appreciated.

[Jon]

Which directions (there are several products mentioned in this 4 year old thread)? What computer/operating system are you using?

[ajs_rdg]

I tried downloading VirtualDub to rotate an avi. It worked, but turned a 24Mb file into one almost 600Mb.

Does anyone know a simpler tool that just rotates the picture and doesn't do anything else?