Windows Live Movie MakerIf you find yourself recording videos in portrait mode with your phone/camera you might recall feeling less-than-smart when you find yourself cranking your neck to the side to watch a video on your computer. Luckily, there’s an easy way to relieve your neck and watch the video like a normal human.

I’m posting this as I was just about to send this to someone via email to help them through it and figured this could help others too (*and* I can just link to this when I get asked next time). So if you’re on a Windows PC, here’s what I recommend you do to create a properly rotated version of your videos.

  1. Start up Windows Live Movie Maker. If you don’t already have it installed, you can install it from here for free.
  2. Open up the folder you have the movie(s) you want to rotate in Windows Explorer.
  3. Drag the movie from Windows Explorer over to the area labeled “Drag videos and photos here…” in Movie Maker.
  4. On the “Home” tab in Movie Maker’s ribbon toolbar (you should be there by default), click on the appropriate button to rotate: ‘Rotate left 90°’ or ‘Rotate right 90°’. At this point, you should now see the video in the correct orientation in the preview pane on the left.
  5. You’re now ready to save the video. In the sharing section of the same ribbon toolbar we used in step #4, you’ll see the ‘Sharing’ pane. You can read more about your options here (e.g., save to YouTube, HD or SD file formats, etc.) in the Windows Live Movie Maker documentation.

In my opinion, this is one of the easiest ways to do this for free and using an application that’s coming from a trustworthy source. It is however not all that flexible in some ways (e.g., your options for your rotated video are somewhat limited) but for most folks it should be just fine.

If you’re curious about other ways to do this, here are a few links that may be of interest