1 post tagged “upload”

I posted nice and early about Flickr and the API, without even posting a video of my own, and with no inkling of the protests that were about to bounce around Flickr's forums. Eventually I pulled a couple of videos from my old photo site (I'm particularly fond of this one, since you really need the movement to see what the point is), and posted them, while I looked for more videos that I'd shot with my old Ixus, generally five years ago now.

This morning, there were two more videos I wanted to post. However, both were in portrait not landscape orientation, and so far I've not found a way of posting them to Flickr the right way up, despite trying a few things. So, here's what doesn't work, before I ask the crowd what will.

Firstly, and most simply, I tried using QuickTime Pro to rotate, using the Movie Properties window as discussed at The Unofficial Apple Weblog, amongst many others. Unfortunately, while this looks as if it works, it's actually just a metadata flag, and Flickr discards it on upload. This fate also befell a "hinted movie" export.

This started me on a search for a suitable Export format. I tried AVI with Cinepak, but that looks truly awful, and I wasn't prepared to even try uploading it. AVI + DV-PAL looked as if it worked, but on upload Flickr converted it to a 4:3 aspect ratio, rather than 3:4, which is obviously no good. The same problem affected various MPEG-4 exports, including the presets for the iPhone and so on that QuickTime offers. I had a look at the 3GPP formats, but these have a maximum size of 320 pixels, while my originals are 640x480. That's no good.

Thinking that maybe I was in the wrong application, I turned instead to iMovie. However, it turns out that it won't even think about producing a movie unless it's in landscape format*. I suppose I can see why: if it's a video for TV, or that would eventually be shown on one, then it'll have to be that way around for it to work. On the other hand, this is the exciting new digital era! Who knows what sort of device your video will end up on? The best I could manage here was to mark the video as rotated, and then crop the middle out to return it to 4:3. Sigh.

After this exploration, though, I can see why post-upload rotation is still on Flickr's to do list for video support (along with replacing videos) - although if it was there, it'd be the solution to my problem right there. Anyway, that's basically the end of the road so far. I keep seeing Windows MovieMaker mentioned as a way to rotate video, but I don't (yet) have Windows installed here, and I'd really rather not for something that I'd thought was trivial. Can anyone else suggest a way of doing this with a Mac software package? In the meantime, you can't see my shiny carousel. Sorry.

Updated: Thanks to Gareth, here's a command line solution.

* iPhoto 7 has a similar problem with cropping images to a 16x9 aspect ratio. For 3x2 and 4x3, you can choose either landscape or portrait; for 16x9, you can only use landscape. My workaround is to rotate, crop, then rotate back, but that's stupid. More sigh.