There are some pretty cool built-in tools in Adobe Premiere to make your FPV look way better! In this tutorial I will show you how to use Warp Stabilizer and Lens Distortion Effects on a shaky video.

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There are two main ways of stabilizing FPV footage, using warp stabilizer kind of works but doesn’t work as well. You can give it a try nonetheless.

The end result isn’t as smooth as other professional/expensive tools, but it helps to some degree to make shaky FPV footage look a bit better! It also massively improves the distorted fish eye effects from cameras with very wide FOV, such as the Runcam Split (or Split Mini) cameras.

All the effects mentioned are built-in and free! I used Premiere CS6 in this tutorial.

What Effects Are Used, Any Why?

Here are the video effects used:

Warp Stabilizer – slightly smooths out footage, in exchange the video is cropped.

Lens Distortion – corrects/removes lens distortion (fish eye effect), in exchange the video is cropped.

Camera View – zoomed in or out to fit the video to the screen and remove any black space on the left/right sides.

Mask – after all these effects, you might notice some curved black spaces at the top and bottom. Mask Effect is to remove them. At the same time it turns this 16:9 footage into something like 21:9, which looks way “more cinematic” :)

Settings for The Effects

Here is what the original footage looks like:

With the Warp Stabilizer, I pretty much kept everything at default. The only things I changed are:

• Smoothness => 3% – When it’s too high, you sometimes get random wobbly background; play with this anyway to find the value that is good for your particular footage
• Method => I found “Position” gives me the least amount of wobbly background, but try other methods
• Additional Scale => 70%, I use this to zoom back out, so you have a wider view to play with later on

This is the result from Warp Stabilizer

For Lens Distortion, the only parameter you need to change is Curvature. This is no right or wrong value, the more you apply the less fish-eye it’s going to look, but you will lose more top and bottom view.

I found -32 to be a good value for the Split Mini 2. This is how it looks like after Lens Distortion.

With Camera View effect, the goal for me is to remove the black space on the left and right. Play with Distance and Zoom. My values are 45 and 9 respectively.

Now we need to remove the curved black spaces on the top and bottom using Mask Effect.

Compared to the original, it just looks way better!

Hope this helps!