Rotate a video 180 degrees

A camera mounted the wrong way up

Action cameras are often fixed under a handlebar, a helmet peak or a selfie stick, with the body hanging below the lens. Dashcams are commonly hung from the top of the windscreen in the same way. If the camera can't sense which way up it is, it records the scene exactly as its sensor sees it, and the sky ends up at the bottom of every frame.

A dashcam or action cam set to flip the picture

Many of these cameras have a menu option that turns the image over for an inverted mount. Leave it on after moving the camera to a normal mount, or switch it on by mistake, and every new clip comes out inverted. The option goes by different names on different models, so look at a frame with writing in it before you pick a fix.

A phone that misjudged which way was up

A phone decides which way is up at the moment you press record. If it is pointing at the floor at that instant, or the camera app follows a screen that is locked in place, the clip can be stored with its top edge at the bottom.

The two can look alike at a glance, but they are different operations. A 180° rotation spins the picture round its centre, reversing it both top to bottom and side to side. A vertical flip reverses only top to bottom, so the picture is still a mirror image once it stands upright.

The writing test

• Writing is upside down but would read normally if you spun the screen round: choose 180°. This is the usual case.
• Writing is upside down and would still read backwards with the screen spun round: the clip is mirrored as well as inverted. Turn on Flip vertical by itself and leave the rotation at 0°.

The second case comes up with footage shot in a mirror, or from a camera set to mirror its image. A half turn on a clip like that leaves every word reversed.

Setting both flip switches is the slow way to reach a half turn, since flips always redraw every frame. Flip a video covers the mirror options in more depth.

With Canvas on Expand and the export settings at their defaults, the tool moves the compressed video and sound into the new file without touching them. All it changes is the rotation value stored with the video track, which tells the player to show the picture the other way up.

A 180° turn never changes the shape of the frame. A 1920 × 1080 clip stays 1920 × 1080 and a 1080 × 1920 one stays tall, so no bars or empty corners appear, and the Corners row stays hidden.

Crop and Fill produce exactly the same picture for a half turn, but they send the export down the redraw route. There is no reason to pick either of them here.

Anything you change under Export settings, such as cutting the ends off or choosing 720p, also brings back the re-encode. Rotating without losing quality spells out every condition.

A few older TVs, media boxes and editing programs ignore the rotation value and show the frames as they were stored. Maximum compatibility is the answer for those.

The switch appears once you pick 180° with Expand and no flips. It draws the picture the right way up inside every frame, so even a player that skips the rotation value can't get it wrong.

This costs a single re-encode at a high bitrate, so the export takes longer than the instant version. Keep the original file until you have checked the result on the device that gave you trouble.

• Inverted and crooked: a camera bolted on upside down is often slightly off level too. Set 180° and then use the Fine angle slider to level the horizon, choosing Fill if you don't want filled corners. That redraws every frame, as straightening a tilted video explains.
• Upside down for part of the clip: the tool applies its turn to everything it exports. If the camera was turned over partway through a ride, trim the inverted stretch into a separate file and turn that, bearing in mind that a trim re-encodes.
• Sideways rather than upside down: that needs a 90° or 270° turn instead, covered in why videos play sideways.