Review: ProDrenalin fixes home action video problems

So you just rode your bicycle off a cliff with a parasail attached, landed on top of an off-road vehicle, then bungeed off a bridge as you grabbed a six-pack off a riverboat captain's lap. And you recorded the whole experience on an action cam. The problem is, when you played the video back for your friends, they all got nauseated from the fast-action camera jump, fish-eye effect, and rolling shutter effect plaguing your video.

What you should do before screening your masterpiece is run it through ProDad's ProDrenalin ($49, free demo with registration). PC software ProDrenalin is a combination of the image stabilization, de-fishing, and color correction found in the company's DeFishr and Mercalli products. It's specifically designed to simplify the process of making your wide-angle action video more palatable for the masses.

ProDrenalin is easy to use. You just load a video and make some choices: a camera profile or the default, whether to stabilize it or not, a color/brightness preset, output quality, format, and location. Then press Start Export and wait for the results.

It works quite well. I don't generate a lot of wide-angle video myself, but the test files I acquired from the vendor flattened out nicely. And my very jumpy video from this year's NASCAR race at Sonoma Raceway stabilized very, very nicely. You'd never know from the results that I was mountain-goating all over the hills.

One small issue with ProDrenalin that I spotted is that it doesn't retain the path information of files that you drag into its window. This forces you to re-browse to the folder if that's where you want to output your video (as I always do). It's a bit of an annoyance, especially as the program remembers the path when you use the import function. Also, make sure you deselect the horizontal comparison option before exporting, or the program outputs the video that way.

ProDrenalin is dead simple to use, alleviates or eliminates most major home video issues, and is a worthwhile purchase if you have a lot of iffy quality video hanging out. Your audiences will thank you for using it, and you'll save a fortune on barf bags.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.