Question :

I have a movie-file that was shot on an iPhone in portrait-mode, but I think it will look better  when viewed in landscape-mode. It’s a video of you cat playing on the carpet, shot from above, so both portrait-mode and landscape-mode are okay for viewing, but as we prefer to view video’s on out TV it would make more sense to have it in landscape-mode.

How do I do that ?

Answer :

In MacOSX and OSX rotating photos was easily done in iPhoto or Photos.app, but rotating video couldn’t be done in iPhoto or Photos.app – that had to be done in video editing software like iMovie, or a dedicated video-rotation-app.

In macOS 10.15 Catalina, rotating video 90 degrees can be done extremely simple in the Finder :

• open the Finder (click out of all apps until you have only the Desktop to look at)
• open a New Finder Window by typing CMD and N keys on your keyboard simultaneously (or goto Finder > File > New Finder Window)
• locate the video-file (if you know it’s name, typ it in the Search-bar, else browse to the file if you know where it’s located)
• then click on the file name to select it
• the video preview will now come up on the right side, with various info and some buttons below it
• to rotate your video 90 degrees counter-clockwise, click on Rotate Left
• to rotate your video 90 degrees clockwise, press the ALT key on your keybord and click on Rotate Right (in the same spot where the Rotate Left button used to be)
• then wait for the processing to end…

…and you’re done 😉

That’s it – enjoy !