Fix Eye Contact in Premiere Pro Footage, No Plugin Needed

Upload the camera original when you can. StoryCut accepts MP4, MOV, AVI, MKV and WebM and returns an H.264 MP4 at the same resolution, up to 4K, so a 4K clip comes back as 4K. If you have to export from Premiere first, use Match Source with a high bitrate, so the correction starts from a clean picture.

Grade after the swap, or keep your grade on the clip: Replace Footage keeps the Lumetri and other effects applied to the clip, so they now sit on the corrected video. The audio is copied untouched, so a synced external recording or a multicam sequence stays in sync.

If you would rather not leave Premiere, the CaptionX plugin is the honest alternative: it places a corrected clip on the track above the original. It costs more per minute, and it needs to be installed on every editing machine.

After Effects has no eye contact effect either. The request on Adobe’s community forum, “Eye Contact Effect like nVidia Broadcast”, was filed for Premiere Pro in May 2023 and is still open for voting, with no reply from Adobe.

The round trip works the same way in After Effects. Correct the original clip in StoryCut, then in the Project panel select the footage item, choose File > Replace Footage > File and pick the corrected MP4. Every composition that uses the clip switches to the corrected version, with your masks, tracking and effects kept, because the length and frame rate match.

Do it before heavy compositing when you can. Roto, face tracking and beauty work done on the original eyes won’t line up perfectly with the redrawn ones, so correct first and composite second.