
- Developer: Limit Point Software/ Product page
- Price: $10 [Free trial available]
This simple app lets you rotate -- in any increment of degrees that you like -- movies, as well as flipping them horizontally and/or vertically. You can also scale them, preserve the date stamp, and optionally choose to overwrite the original movie. All of these values are set in the program's preferences.
To set the rotation angle, you move a slider anywhere from 0 degrees to 360 degrees. While this works, I wish there were indicators on the slider for 90-degree increments, which would make these often-used values easier to find. Still, if you always rotate your camera one direction, you'll only have to set this value once, so it's not too bad. (If you use anything other than 90-degree increments, TransformMovie adds a black frame around your video.)
Once you've set the preferences, you use TransformMovie by simply dragging and dropping video clips into its small window. It will prompt for a destination (you can also set that in preferences), then apply your specified transformation. It's simple and fast, and works quite well.
While it's not free, $10 is much nicer than $30 for QuickTime Pro, and paying for any one of Limit Point's utilities gives you a license for all of their utilities. Since pointing my relatives at TransformMovie, I've spent a lot less time rotating videos for them, and that's a good thing!
Note: This week's Pick marks a change -- the picks are no longer rated. Several readers have pointed out that if a given program is chosen as a Pick of the Week, that implies at least a certain level of usability and features. (The reality was that the majority of Picks scored either 8 or 9, with the occasional 10 and the even-rarer 7, so we effectively had about a three-step scale anyway.)
After mulling it over, I've decided I agree with them. I'll still try to point out any problems I spot in a given program, obviously, but I'll no longer be assigning an actual rating to each one.

