The FishEye effect is one of the popular ones among the effects that take footage out of the normal zone. Creatives use it for different purposes like adding a little fun to the video, making fuzziness, giving an overview of a place, etc. You can create this effect both inside Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro. Let’s see how to get it done.
After Effects
Open up After Effects and import the footage you want to be fish-eyed. Then inside the Effects & Presets panel, search for the Warp effect. Then under the Distort choose Warp and apply it to your footage. You will see that the footage is distorted and a side of it is black. Don’t worry, go to the Effect Controls and change the Warp Style to FishEye.
Premiere Pro
So inside Premiere Pro, after importing your footage to your timeline, search for the Lens Distortion effect in the Effects panel and add it to your video. After that, go to the Effects Controls and under the Lens Distortion, set the Curvature to 100, and also Unselect the Fill Alpha. You’ll see that you got dark edges around the frame so to fix this, go up and under the Transform, increase the Scale to something around 160. the aim is to fill the frame by zooming in. You can also add an Ellipse mask under Opacity to give the footage a round frame to make it look like it’s shot by a fisheye lens. Keep in mind that it’s way better to use this technique for videos with high quality, as you have to zoom in.
So you can turn your normal videos into a curved fisheye video by using these two methods in Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro. But the way of getting even more professional fisheye look for your video is by using a fisheye lens to record the video with, and see what you’ll get as the result, early on. This is true about many tasks in filmmaking, to design shooting based on what you want in the end. But if you don’t have access to the fisheye camera lens or have decided to add the effect after the recording, you can use the mentioned ways to get the effect in post.
