How to remove action camera fisheye distortion in under 20 seconds

Action cameras have become part of many a filmmaker and photographer arsenal. Even if they’re not our primary camera, they’re great for grabbing behind the scenes clips or putting in higher risk situations. And then, sometimes, they are the primary camera, capturing the action. But most of them come with a pretty severe fisheye effect.

Some can deal with this natively in-camera, but often you get the best results in post. But how can you deal with it effectively? In this super short 20 second video from YouTuber Aidin Robbins, we see just how easy it is to fix. Aidin uses Hitfilm Express for this video, but the principle is the same in other editing applications.

As counterintuitive as it may sound, the solution is to add a fisheye effect in your editing application. But instead of telling it to create the effect, you simply tell it to reverse the fisheye.

You can do this in just about every desktop video editing application out there. For Premiere Pro you’ve got the Lens Distortion effect, and in Adobe After Effects, it’s Optics Compensation. DaVinci Resolve Studio has it built right into the clip properties. Other applications have their own methods, but they’re all fairly straightforward.

Aidin suggests, once you’ve corrected your first piece of footage with a specific camera to save it as a preset. This way, when you use that camera again in the future with the same settings, you don’t need to figure it out from scratch. Just apply your preset and you’re done.

With GoPro Studio now no longer around, it’s good to have other options.