Your Action Cam Footage is Lying to You

Let's be honest, your action camera's wide-angle lens makes everything look like it's been trapped in a funhouse mirror. Straight lines curve, horizons bend, and your epic FPV dive looks suspiciously like a view from a goldfish bowl. It's a problem. A fixable one, but a problem nonetheless.

The solution involves pointing your camera at a checkerboard pattern for a couple of minutes. Seriously. The magic happens inside Gyroflow, where you feed it this riveting footage and let it build a custom lens profile. It meticulously maps out your camera's unique brand of optical weirdness, then un-weirds it for you.

Before you get started, a few ground rules. Don't use a curved monitor for your checkerboard, unless you want a useless profile. And yes, a new profile is required for every resolution and field-of-view setting you use. It's tedious, but so is watching bent footage. Pick your poison.

We've distilled the entire process, as expertly explained by Painless360, into a much longer, more detailed guide. If you're ready to make your footage look like it was shot with an actual lens instead of a doorknob, read the full breakdown here. Or, just watch the video below. It involves less reading.