Issues with (2) GoPro 8 4ks

I have (2) GoPro Hero 8’s setup for this project, but I have 2 problems:

  1. the video is producing distortions and I am not sure why or how to prevent this. This is NOT a defect in the video itself and you dont see it in either video

  2. Is there a trick to sync’ing the video. Pressing the “align by audio” never seems to work. My next thought was to stand in the middle of the two cameras and hold up some sort of video on my phone so I could align it by that exact frame.

This is present immediately when i try to stitch:

Move to red line to left side a bit.