BRAW Gyro Stabilizer — Premiere Pro Plugin

Stabilize handheld shots using the motion the camera already recorded.

Blackmagic cameras save exactly how they moved — from their built-in gyroscope and accelerometer — inside every .braw. This Premiere Pro effect reads that motion and digitally counter-steers each frame to cancel the shake, live on the GPU. It's the same gyro data DaVinci Resolve stabilizes with, brought to the Premiere timeline — drop it on the clip and play.

Install guide ↓

macOS (Apple silicon) only for now. A Windows version (CUDA / OpenCL) is planned if there's enough interest — let me know if you'd use it.

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Zero calibration, zero setup

Everything it needs is already in the .braw, so there's nothing to configure, sync, or calibrate. Where a standalone gyro stabilizer means round-tripping every clip and building lens calibration profiles for each combination of lens, resolution, and frame rate, this does it all automatically:

• Automatic per-frame focal length — tracks a zoom lens through the shot; no typing in focal lengths or picking a lens. (Using a manual lens? The camera may report a wrong focal — set the real value via Focal Length Override.)
• No lens calibration — it reads the camera's real sensor geometry from the file, so there are no profiles to build or maintain for each lens, resolution, or frame rate.
• Automatic rolling-shutter correction — sensor readout read from the file, fixed line-by-line.
• Off-speed footage handled automatically — e.g. shot at 48 fps and interpreted at 24 fps.
• Works with any BRAW importer — official Blackmagic or third-party (e.g. Autokroma BRAW Studio); it reads the gyro from the file, not from whatever decodes the picture.
• Instant — no analysis, no "stabilizing…" pass, no export or re-import; the warp is computed per frame on the GPU as you play, so the result is simply there.

One caveat: it's built specifically for Blackmagic .braw clips that contain embedded gyro, running on Apple-silicon / Metal — it's not a general-purpose, multi-camera stabilizer.

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Supported cameras

Any Blackmagic camera that records gyro into the .braw — it isn't tied to a specific model. Current bodies: Pocket Cinema Camera 4K, 6K, 6K G2 and 6K Pro, Cinema Camera 6K, PYXIS 6K, and the URSA Cine line (plus the Micro Studio Camera 4K G2).

Two things to check:

• Firmware. Gyro recording was added to the Pocket 4K / 6K family in Blackmagic Camera 7.9 — footage shot on older firmware has no motion data, so update the camera. Newer bodies (Cinema Camera 6K, PYXIS, URSA Cine) ship with it. Older cinema cameras without a built-in motion sensor (e.g. the URSA Mini Pro) don't record it at all.
• .braw only. The gyro is written to Blackmagic RAW, not ProRes — a ProRes (.mov) clip has no motion data to stabilize with, even from a camera that supports it.

Apply it to a clip with no embedded gyro and it just passes the frame through unchanged (the Check support button tells you so).

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Install

No building required — grab the installer:

1. Download BRAW-Gyro-Stabilizer-x.x.x.pkg from the latest release.
2. Double-click it. It isn't signed with an Apple Developer ID, so the first time macOS blocks it — "…was blocked to protect your Mac." This is expected.
3. Open System Settings → Privacy & Security, scroll to Security, and click Open Anyway next to the blocked-.pkg message. Confirm with your password / Touch ID, then follow the installer prompts (it asks for an admin password).
   • Older macOS: you can instead right-click the .pkg → Open.
4. Restart Premiere Pro.

That's it — the effect shows up under Video Effects → BRAW Tools. (Apple-silicon Mac + Premiere Pro 26.) To build it yourself instead, see Building from source.

Uninstall: delete the plug-in and restart Premiere:

sudo rm -rf "/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Common/Plug-ins/7.0/MediaCore/BRAWGyroStabilizer.plugin"

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Usage

Apply Video Effects → BRAW Tools → BRAW Gyro Stabilizer to a BRAW clip and play — it reads the gyro and stabilizes on its own. The controls are optional fine-tuning; most of the time you'll only reach for Smoothing.

Control	Default	What it does
Status row (top, button)	—	Shows the detected camera — or !! NO GYRO DATA IN CLIP !! / !! UNSUPPORTED FILE !!. Press Check to refresh.
Smoothing (%)	50	How much of the motion is smoothed away. 0 = rolling-shutter fix only; higher = steadier but crops in more. For moving (gimbal/pan) shots, higher values eat more frame — the deliberate move itself gets flattened.
Focal Override (mm)	0 = auto	Leave at 0 (auto-read per frame, tracks zoom lenses). Set the real value for manual lenses that report a wrong focal.
Horizon → Lock (%)	0 = off	Levels the horizon to true gravity (accelerometer-anchored). 0 = off, 100 = fully level.
Horizon → Tilt (deg)	0	Holds the leveled horizon at this angle — for deliberately canted shots. Only matters when Lock > 0.
Scale → Scale to Fill	on	Auto-zoom that hides the edges the warp exposes. Local and self-adjusting: calm sections sit near no-crop, hard hits get covered, and it holds steady (no pumping).
Scale → Scale Follows Zoom (%)	0 = off	Zoom lenses only. Smooths jerky / hard-stopping zoom motion so it reads like a motorized zoom. ~25 is a good working value. A slight scale lead-in/settle around the zoom is inherent to how this works.
Scale → Extra Scale (%)	0	Manual digital zoom on top of the auto-crop.
Debug → Debug Logging	off	Writes diagnostics to /tmp/brawgyro.log.
Debug → Render path (button)	—	Shows whether it's running on GPU (Metal) or CPU (software).
Debug → Updates (button)	—	Checks GitHub for a newer release — only when clicked, never automatically.
Save settings (button)	—	Saves the current values as the defaults for newly-applied instances (takes effect after a Premiere restart).

Terminology: "zoom" = the lens's optical zoom (focal length); "scale" = the plugin's digital crop.

Saved defaults & advanced tuning live in a plain text file: ~/Library/Application Support/BRAWGyroStabilizer/defaults.ini — written by Save settings, hand-editable. Two advanced keys have no UI control and are re-read live (no restart): rolling_shutter (ms, 0 = auto from the file's metadata) and zoom_sync_offset_frames (timing trim between the lens metadata and the picture for Scale Follows Zoom; default 1.2).

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How it works

The gyro tells the plugin exactly how the camera was pointing at every instant. It smooths that into the steady move you wanted, and the difference between the real (shaky) and smooth orientation is the correction — applied as a per-frame image warp, computed line-by-line so a rolling shutter's skew is fixed too, with a small auto-zoom to hide the edges the warp exposes.

For the details, the core is src/gyro/GyroIntegrator.cpp (motion → warp) and src/plugin/GPUFilter.mm (the Metal render path Premiere uses).

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Building from source

Requirements

• Apple Silicon Mac (arm64), Premiere Pro 26
• Blackmagic RAW SDK at /Applications/Blackmagic RAW/Blackmagic RAW SDK/
• Premiere Pro 26.0 C++ SDK and the free After Effects SDK, under one SDK root (default ~/SDKs/; override with -DSDK_ROOT=<path> or the SDK_ROOT env var)
• Xcode command-line tools and CMake: xcode-select --install · brew install cmake

Build & install

cd /path/to/braw_gyro_stabilizer
./build.sh

The script configures, compiles, links, signs, and installs the plug-in into Premiere's plug-ins folder. Restart Premiere to load a freshly built binary.

./build.sh clean      # wipe the build folder
./build.sh uninstall  # remove from Premiere's plug-ins

To produce the double-click .pkg installer from a build, run ./package.sh (output in dist/).

Project layout

braw_gyro_stabilizer/
├── build.sh                    ← one-shot build + install
├── CMakeLists.txt
├── pipl/BRAWGyroStabilizer.r   ← declares the plugin to Premiere
├── shaders/WarpKernel.metal    ← reference warp kernel
└── src/
    ├── braw/BRAWReader         ← BRAW SDK wrapper (gyro, focal scan, rolling shutter)
    ├── gyro/GyroIntegrator     ← motion → smoothed path → per-row homography + auto-zoom
    ├── warp/MetalWarpEngine    ← Metal warp for the CPU/AE-compat fallback
    ├── plugin/GPUFilter.mm     ← GPU render path (the one Premiere uses)
    ├── plugin/PluginMain       ← effect entry point, params, CPU render
    └── common/                 ← logging, path helpers, per-clip status store

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Disclaimer

This is an independent project, not affiliated with, authorized, or endorsed by Blackmagic Design or Adobe. It simply reads the motion metadata inside .braw files.

"Blackmagic", "Blackmagic RAW", "BRAW", "DaVinci Resolve", "URSA", and "PYXIS" are trademarks of Blackmagic Design; "Adobe" and "Premiere Pro" are trademarks of Adobe. All trademarks belong to their respective owners and are used here only to describe compatibility.