How to rotate a video in DaVinci Resolve

Rotation Angle in the Inspector changes one clip in one timeline. If the same sideways file is used again and again, set the turn once on the source instead: right-click it in the Media Pool, choose Clip Attributes, and on the Video tab set Image Orientation. Every use of that clip, in every timeline, then comes in upright, so you don’t rotate each cut separately.

The Cut page has the same Inspector, so the steps work there too if that’s where you edit.

Next to the position and rotation controls in the Inspector’s Transform group are two Flip buttons: one reflects the clip left to right, the other top to bottom. Click again to undo. A horizontal flip fixes a webcam or selfie recording with backwards writing (why recordings come out mirrored). A clip that is simply upside down wants a Rotation Angle of 180 instead, because a vertical flip would leave it reversed.

Resolve turns the picture inside the timeline’s frame, so a 1920×1080 clip turned 90° becomes a tall picture in a wide frame, shrunk to fit with black on both sides. There are two ways out:

1. Make the timeline vertical. Open File → Project Settings, set the timeline resolution in Master Settings to 1080 × 1920 (tick Use vertical resolution if your version has it), then click Save. For a single timeline, untick Use Project Settings when you create it with File → New Timeline and set the size on its Format tab.
2. Zoom to fill. Keep the landscape timeline and raise Zoom in the Inspector until the bars are gone. That crops a lot: only a band across the middle of the picture survives.

Clips whose shape doesn’t match the timeline are framed by Image Scaling in Project Settings: Scale entire image to fit leaves bars, while Scale full frame with crop fills the frame and trims the edges.

Footage that was filmed upright and only looks sideways because of a missing flag is a different case. Once it’s upright it’s already portrait, so give it a vertical timeline and leave Rotation Angle at 0. Converting horizontal video to vertical covers the crop-or-rotate choice for landscape shots.

Rotation Angle takes any value, so 2 or -1.5 levels a crooked horizon; nudge Zoom up a little to hide the corners that open up. To spin a clip over time, click the keyframe diamond beside Rotation Angle at the start, move the playhead, change the angle, and Resolve animates between the two. Straightening a tilted video shows how much zoom each angle costs.

Not in any practical way: rendering from the Deliver page encodes the picture again, even when the only change is a turn. That’s fine as part of an edit, but it’s slow and slightly lossy for a clip that only needs to be the right way up.

For that job, change the rotation flag instead. The tool at the top of this page does it with Turn right or Turn left: the video stream is copied untouched, so it’s lossless and finishes in seconds, and nothing is uploaded. On the command line, FFmpeg’s -display_rotation does the same.