Shooting with a wide-angle lens is a great way to capture a high angle of view but unless you have the super expensive lenses you will most likely most distortion. It is the same distortion effect you would see when taking still photographs. This is usually easy to correct with photography but for video, it can take a lot of work and you might see the quality of your video degrade.
The easiest way I have found to work around this is with the plugin from Alex4D called Alex4D Wide Angle Fix. This easy to use plugin offers simple controls for automatically correcting barrel distortion while also giving you custom control to fine-tune your correction.
How to Use the Alex4D Wide Angle Fix Plugin
After downloading and running the Installer provided, you will need to restart Final Cut Pro for the plugin to take effect. Next, drag the footage that you are wanting to correct in the timeline. Then go to your Effects Browser and you will see, listed under Effects in the left column, Alex4D. Click here and you will find the Alex4D Wide Angle Fix plugin.
Click and drag that effect to your footage and release. This will apply the effect to your clip and automatically correct most of the distortion in your clip. From there, you will need to look in the Video Inspector section for the options to correct your footage. Under the Alex4D Wide Angle Lens Effect, you will see a Lens section that has 4 built-in options: GoPro 90° 0.05, GoPro 127°-0.2, GoPro 170°-0.3, and Custom. Here is where you will choose which preset closely matches your footage. Even though GoPro is specifically mentioned here, most wide-angle lenses have the same field of view between 120 and 130.
If you are wanting to further dial in your distortion correction, you can use the Custom slider to do so. I personally have found with the various footage I have played with using this plugin, the preset corrections in the Lens section work very well and I rarely need to adjust the Custom slider.
Below the Custom Angle slider, you will find a Grid checkbox. This applies grid lines to make it easier for you to see straight edges if you are using the Custom Angle slider. Related to the Grid, you will see two Color selectors that allow you to change the vertical and horizontal colors of the grid. Below that you are able to rotate the grid overlay as well if you have footage where your horizon is at an angle.
If you are a video shooter who constantly uses wide-angle lenses in your productions, this is a must-have plugin. You can download it FREE via the Alex4D website here!
