ProDrenalin Fixes Action Sports Video Footage

A bumpy ride on a mountain bike or motorcycle can be a fun way to spend your day, but watching the video you made during your ride is often a nauseating experience. The combined camera shake, fisheyed perspective from the GoPro camera lens, and generally unstable video image doesn’t quite live up to the adrenalin rush of the moment. ProDrenalin does an outstanding job of fixing your GoPro video, making you look like an action sports video pro in the process.

Whether you use a Mac or Windows, there are some good reasons to check out ProDrenalin if you own a GoPro or other action sports camera.

Image Stabilization and Rolling Shutter Compensation

You might remember my review of Mercalli Easy Image Stabilization, which simplifies image stabilization for smartphone video recordings. The same ProDad image stabilization technology that powers Mercalli Easy is behind the image stabilization in ProDrenalin. The software does a deep analysis of all of the motion in your video and then provides corrective action for a smooth motion experience. Much like the CMOS censor in smartphone cameras, the GoPro image sensor also suffers from rolling shutter issues during high motion, which can be compensated for using ProDrenalin to apply a fix.

Fisheye Correction

While the fisheye perspective of GoPro cameras can make for an interesting cinematic effect in some cases, a little warped perspective goes a long way. As you can see in the series of image examples below. What’s really a very straight bridge across my morning commute route looks like it makes a sweeping curve overhead from the GoPro perspective. By applying the Fisheye Removal feature, the bridge gets straightened out to it’s natural shape. ProDrenalin has presets for all the GoPro settings or you can customize the fisheye removal to achieve a setting that’s perfect for your video production.

Here’s a split view of before and after processing for straightening out the bridge:

Here’s the full view of the bridge before processing with fisheye removal:

Here’s the full view of the bridge after processing with fisheye removal:

You can see from the after picture that one of the things that happens is the ProDrenalin software zooms in a bit in order to flatten the image to its natural perspective.

Other ProDrenalin Features

If Image stabilization and fisheye correction were all ProDrenalin did, it would be well worth the money. The software does a number of other things that make it a recommended choice for action sports editing.

While I love the hard work ProDrenalin does to make my videos look great – one of my favorite features is the batch processing option. ProDrenalin lets you configure settings on a bunch of GoPro videos, then process them all at once.

Tilt correction is another great feature of ProDrenalin, particularly because it’s easy to bump your GoPro and knock it slightly off access. By correcting camera perspective, you can straighten video before you publish.

Color Correction is another strength of ProDrenalin. GoPro cameras have a color space that doesn’t match the real world. By using the color correction in ProDrenalin, which is automatic but can also be adjusted manually, you end up with vibrant looking video.

Bottom Line on ProDrenalin

You could attempt to recreate the features of ProDrenalin by spending time tweaking the settings in your favorite video editor to manually adjust fisheye compensation and continuously re-run image stabilization settings, but I’m not sure why you’d want to. In most cases, you would need additional plugins to be successful.

ProDad has the best image stabilization solution on the market, which they’ve automated inside ProDrenalin. By creating fisheye presets for all the GoPro camera configurations, the corrective action is already done for you. ProDrenalin does all the hard work of fixing your videos, leaving you with more time to spend on your favorite adventures.