Well, I did it. I took a video with my phone upright instead of across in landscape mode. So the video has the ugly black bars on the sides. And what I want to see is teeny tiny. Now that Google has taken away YouTube video editing, I had to find another way to convert portrait video to landscape video.
Get a look at these cliff jumpers we saw in Maui.
I wanted to use it in my post about the black sand beaches in Maui, but it just didn’t look very pretty with those ugly black bars on the sides.
I upload my blog videos to YouTube and then insert a link in my posts. Last time I did it for my snorkeling videos we made with a hack for cheap underwater videos, I was able to do all the editing I needed in Youtube. But after uploading my video this time, it took me a sweet forever to find the video editing tools I remembered using in the past. (That’s what happens when you only use something every 6 months.)
Only to find that Google greatly reduced YouTube editing capabilities at the end of 2017.
Arg!
Or maybe not.
Can you edit videos in Youtube?
Eventually I was able to find the Youtube tools to edit videos!
I was clicking around on my dashboard when I managed to get an edit page where “Enhancement” was one of the options showing at the top of the videos.
And so I was happily editing along, stabilizing the video or magically correcting the color, decided I didn’t like what I’d done, and clicked “revert to saved.”
Only it didn’t.
It jumped back to my video list. And my video was branded “Edit in progress.”
Only I couldn’t get back to the editing.
Maybe this has happened to you? You’ll click and click and click but you just won’t be able to find that “enhancement” button again. And you’ll begin to feel really stupid. Or maybe insane.
Ask me how I know.
But you will keep clicking and trying different combinations.
Until you realize that when you do the exact same keystrokes you only sometimes get the enhancement option! And it probably has something to do with the message “Starting August 22, 2018, some Enhancements features will no longer be available. Blur and Trim features will remain available. Learn more.”
Ha! That may be a month away but clearly they are messing with me!
Turns out the control to convert a portrait video to landscape probably was never in YouTube anyway.
Is there free software to edit a video to turn it sideways?
So I went searching for a way to convert the portrait video to landscape mode. I searched on Google. (Who owns YouTube, of course.)
I searched: Convert portrait video to landscape. Rotate video. Crop video. Trim video. Resize video. Rotate video. Trim camera video taken in portrait to landscape mode.
Various searches indicated that I could do it with programs I already had. Lots of posts said I could edit the video on YouTube, but they were all outdated or reposted with new dates. (So frustrating!) Lots of posts said I could do it in Google photos, on Google Drive, inside Chrome or with VLC Media Player. But even with supposed directions, I couldn’t get it to work.
I managed to just plain rotate it.
Which caused the guys to jump sideways into a sideways ocean. Um, not exactly what I was looking for!
And you can still “plain” rotate a video in YouTube.
I found ways I could convert videos from portrait to landscape with a free trial. But I’d have to download a program. And then it wouldn’t work in 6 months or a year later when I want to rotate another video I stupidly took in landscape mode. Most of the top results all went to the same resources, resources like this that I had to pay for. (Adding “free” to “convert portrait video to landscape video” didn’t work because of that free trial part.)
But did I finally figure our how to convert a portrait video to landscape mode for free?
Yes!
(Otherwise this post is pointless.)
Edit videos to turn portrait videos sidways to landscape videos for free
I finally found a free way to convert portrait videos to landscape videos on the internet!
It took me some fiddling, but lucky for you I’m going to tell you the exact steps to rotate and convert and crop your upright portrait video to a sideways landscape video and get rid of the ugly black bars on EZGIF:
- Go to EZGIF.com – crop video
- Upload video file > choose file. Browse to find video file on your computer.
- This will take awhile, and then your video will come up with some tools across the top. Notice that the crop video tool is selected.
- Scroll down below your video.
- For aspect ratio choose > 16:9.
- Scroll back up to your video, choose an approximate corner of the area you want to zoom in on, click and hold then drag and release to choose an area. It will only drag in the ratio of a full landscape video.
- The crop arrow will now change to a 4-way arrow. You can click and grab to re-position the frame to choose the best possible placement for your crop.
- Scroll back below your video and choose > Crop Video!
- Watch the dancing cat. (I think that’s what that is.)
- Your video will appear below.
- > save, to download it to your computer.
Portrait video converted to landscape video using free website
Here’s the video I converted from portrait to landscape mode below. Looks better with out the black bars on the side of the video doesn’t it?
Then, after all that, I looked at the converted video and realized the jumping didn’t look as impressive in landscape mode for some reason. That’s when I remembered I’d taken the video in portrait mode on purpose. Arg! If you want to know more about our trip to Maui, you can see this video and more on my post Best stop on the Road to Hana! Black Sand Beach Maui.
See more about our Maui trip and see the snorkeling videos on my post Beginners Guide to Best Snorkeling in Maui.
See my cheap hack for underwater videos on my post Snorkeling Tip – cheap hack for underwater video and photos.
Anyway. Fooey on you Google/Youtube. Next time I’ll search on Bing.