How to avoid black bars when rotating videos in Premiere Pro?

Rotating videos without black corners in Premiere Pro is easy. Read the below article to learn how to automatically avoid black bars when rotating a clip in Adobe Premiere Pro.

You might want to rotate a video in Premiere Pro for a variety of reasons. Tilted footage is one of them. In videos, tilted footage is a common problem. Transitions or effects are additional reasons to rotate a video.

Black bars appearing in the corners of a video after it has been rotated is a common problem. Other video editing programs just zoom in to solve this issue. Premiere Pro does not offer such an auto-scaling feature when rotating. This leaves the user with the tiresome job of rotating a video and then zooming in.

But what if there was a plugin that rotates videos while automatically scaling them?

Black Corners after rotation in Premiere Pro
Black corners after rotation in Premiere Pro

Straighten a Crooked Horizon using the Horizon Fixer Extension

Horizon Fixer (Straighten Tool) Extension

This article mentions the Horizon Fixer plugin. Use below buttons to learn more.

Using an Extension

When using the Horizon Fixer extension you can simply use the custom rotation panel to rotate the video however you like. If the Enable Auto Scale setting is enabled, the extension will automatically detect the optimal scale. This will prevent black bars and over-scaling. Over scaling is an issue where the footage is scaled more than necessary, which leads to a loss in video quality. The extension will prevent this.

Premiere Pro video rotation without black corners
Premiere Pro video rotation without black corners

You can also enable keyframes and the extension will automatically zoom in whenever the rotation changes to make sure black corners are never visible.


Fixing a Crooked Horizon

If you are planning on leveling the horizon of your footage, the plugin comes in very handy: You can read more about horizon leveling in the following article: How to Straighten a Crooked Horizon in Premiere Pro