The quality of video from a compact camera or even some camera phones is really not bad nowadays.

However, a common problem is that the person shooting the video rotates the camera to shoot in "portrait" mode. Unfortunately this means that when played back on a PC or DVD player, the video is shown on its side.

There are plenty of commercial products that will remedy this, but I use a free utility called Virtual Dub.

To rotate AVI video files in VirtualDub:

• Open your source video
  
• Click "Video->Filters" in the menu
• Click "Add" and select "Rotate"
• Choose whether you want the video rotated left or right (it will show you a preview if you're unsure!)
• Click "Save as AVI" (choose a different location or filename as it won't let you overwrite the original file)

VirtualDub is currently hosted on Sourceforge, download links available from the VirtualDub website.

---