Editing cellphone videos in Ubuntu Linux

If you have a slightly older android cell phone, chances are it records videos using the “3gp” format. When editing 3gp videos in OpenShot on Ubuntu, the audio and video can become unsynced. I have found that using the WinFF application you can convert the 3gp video into “DV – Raw DV for NTSC full screen” format, which will allow OpenShot to edit it correctly without having audio sync problems.

As a side note, sometimes when shooting videos with a cell phone, you may forget to rotate the phone to “landscape” orientation and be left with a vertical video that is rotated 90 degrees when shown on a computer. OpenShot can be used to rotate videos as follows:

  1. right click on the clip
  2. click Properties
  3. Choose the Effect tab (far right)
  4. Hit the “+” sign and then scroll down to “R” for Rotate.
  5. In the effects settings:
    • set the Rotate X, Y and Z to 0.00
    • set the Fixed Rotate X variable to 90.0.
  6. Hit apply

2 thoughts on “Editing cellphone videos in Ubuntu Linux

    • Yes, unless you resize (shrink) the video it will have to chop parts off the top and bottom. You can use the “X offset” setting to move the video up or down to choose which parts get cut off (I know that is counter intuitive, but because you are rotating it, the original X gets converted to Y).

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