How to flip and rotate footage in Premiere Pro?

Published on May 6, 2020

Video Effects

flip effect, flip horizontal, flip vertical, rotate, rotation

Flipping and rotating footage in Premiere Pro

Rotate Property

Imagine shooting an amazing shot and after importing it in Adobe Premiere Pro you realize that the horizon isn’t completely straight. That sucks, right? But there’s no need to reshoot your shot!

Rotating footage is actually really simple in Premiere Pro. After you’ve placed your footage in the timeline, select it and head over to the effect controls panel. Here you will find the rotation property. We’ve already talked about this in the Effect Controls video. Changing the value to the right (or with positive numbers) will rotate the clip clockwise while negative numbers or sliding to the left will rotate it counter clockwise. When you pass 360° you will a number appear in front of the degrees. This number indicates the fact that your video made a complete rotation. If you put keyframes in the rotation property you can make an animation where your footage slants or rotates.

Rotating footage happens quite more often than you would think. You often shoot a magnificent shot but when you start editing it you realize that your horizon isn’t straight. Rotating it a bit will do the trick. But when your sequence size and video size are the same black borders will appear when rotating you will need to scale your video a bit.

Flip Effect

Sometimes you need to hold your camera upside down to get a specific shot, for instance when it’s a super low angle gimbal shot. In Premiere Pro there are simple effects that you can find in the effects panel which can solve this. The first one is ‘flip horizontal’ will flip your footage on the horizontal axis, so left will become right and vice versa. In the case of the upside down shot we want to add the ‘flip vertical’ effect. In some cases you will need both the horizontal and vertical flip to get your shot right. But since these effects are just drag and drop effects you really don’t have to put a lot of effort into it.

Learn even more with our skillshare classes

We love to make weekly tutorials about the basics of Premiere Pro but if you can’t wait a week until a next video comes out you can always join our Skillshare classes. We make classes about lighting, editing, creative film making and even masking in Premiere Pro. The first two months are completely for free and it will give you access to thousands of classes on Skillshare, so definitely worth checking it out!