How to Blur Face Logo or Number Plate in Premiere Pro

All right, this video, we're going to blur stuff, we're going to try and track faces, and blur this dodgy guy. We'll blur number plates, we will blur logos; see the socks, a little blurry bits on them, we'll track that and blur them, and we'll also do some static blurring where, can you see in the top right here, I've blurred out like the date, or maybe it's an email address from a screen cast, we're going to do all that in this video. 

Let's start with blurring a face, we're going to use the same Morph Cut again. You can use any face, making sure that there's no existing masks on it. We're going to kind of recap a tiny bit, and show you how to use the blur. So what we do is slightly different, and what we need to do now is, I've got Lumetri applied, I'm going to get rid of them too. So we add the blur effect first, and we mask that, that's the kind of the slight difference. We don't use the Opacity Mask, and we don't use Lumetri, we go to 'Effects', and we say, give me 'Blur'. There's lots of blurs, everyone uses Gaussian Blur, because it works. 

First thing we'll do is turn up the blurriness, but default's on 0, so we'll decide on how blurry our face needs to be, like I'm pretty distinctive, anyway. We can change that later on, can you see, blur has its own ability to add a mask. So basically there's so much, the opacity has the exact same thing. So it can get confusing, but it's also really useful, because it means I can blur just this. I'm going to use the circle, making sure, at the beginning of my clip, get it kind of close and big enough, that's kind of good enough for me. 

How much do I blur the edges? I don't know, for the edges, that much, that's fine for me, just know that, you know, blurring the edges of this is not what we want, we want-- this is the Gaussian Blur blurriness, we'll do the stuff in the middle there, here we go. That's it, we just need to track it, circles are pretty good for track. So we're just going to say, 'Track Forward', and it's going to do its little thing, move through that clip, and hopefully we'll have a blurry face that kind of bobs around. Here we go. Suspicious, let's do it with another plate. 

It's not going to be all that different, but let's do it. So in your Project files, let's import, I use 'Command I' there, because there's no space to double click. You can see, I use about 10 different ways of importing, and I just do, just whatever feels convenient at the time. Let's bring in Blur 01 and 02. Remember, 3, don't check it, it's a surprise for the class project, it's a little treasure there for you. I know you're going to go check it. Let's start with Blur 01, let's make a sequence from it. You'll see that it is Audi R8, which is pretty nice. I'm going to use my backslash, '\' key, to fill up the little line down here, and it's basically the same. 

I find, in my 'Effects Panel', I go to 'Gaussian Blur', drag it on, crank it up, make it a rectangle, number plates are rectangles, get it close to the sides-ish, big enough, there we go, and then smash away at that one. Like we did in the last tutorial, if it does get wayward you're going to have to do it frame by frame, it's hard when a car like turns off screen, you have to kind of start messing with it, there we go. That's done a pretty sweet job. 

This makes me brings up a point, earlier I said, "Why would you play it backwards?" You play it backwards if, let's say the car turns onto the screen, and the final shot is this, like that's our, that's our final shot, let's say that's the end of our clip, right there, and the beginning though is the car turning on, onto the screen. So there's nothing really to mask there. So what you can do is get to the end here, draw your mask on and then say Play Backwards, and it will go as far as it can, until the car is like turning off screen, the number plate gets too obscured, and then you can fix those last few frames. 

So I kind of contradict myself there. What is it for? It has good use. So that's blurring an overplay, let's blur logos, so same thing except I'm going to show you how to do more than one blur on a same kind of clip. So let's bring in Blur 02, we'll not bring it in, let's just make a new sequence for Blur 02, thank you, Everett, and you can see, this one, a lot of moving around, so we need to track it, let's see how well it does. So I'm going to start at the beginning, maybe I'll start at the back, yeah, let's start at the back. So just for giggles, so when you get to the back, you notice it goes black, if you snap right to the end, you can use your left arrow, just to go back one keyframe. 

So let's again find our Effects panel, now I'm just going to close down Media Browser, and Libraries, Info, and Markers, we're not using it at the moment. Let's get both of those to open, it's a Gaussian Blur, dump it on the clip, crank it up, and in our case, I don't know, circle, pen tool, another rectangle, The Nike tech needs to be removed for branding reasons, happens a lot in television. It's always really awkward, right? You see people blurring out really famous brands, and it just draws way more attention to them, but hey, let's keep the lawyers happy. 

So how does that look? I'm clicking there, use my little zoom in shortcut, because this guy jumps, let's see how well it's going to track it. Needs to be big enough as well for this thing to be able to fit in. You can see, this one's a lot longer, because it's stretched around, So I might go like that, let's see how that goes, a little bit trial and error. Let's hit 'Play' to run through, see how well it tracks it, let's check it out. I'll let it go, oh, I did good, good work, Premiere Pro, cool. 

I might need to blur the edges a bit more, because, you can see, if I click off, there's this kind of like, maybe sharp bit here, which I can fix afterwards with, my masking, feather the edge too feathery, something like that, cool. So let's add a second one to get this, you do it to the exact same clip, and you don't have two blurs, you have two masks, you can see, it says Mask 01, let's twirl that down, so it goes away, and you can just click another one, you have Mask 02, and that's going to be this other one, and there's no difference, except you do need to make sure--

I always do this, I'm halfway through a clip, when I start doing it, so it's better to do it at one end or the other, get to the end, hit the 'backspace' key, get that kind of closer, there we go, nice. Feather the edge a bit, and I'm going to play that way. Mask 02 did a great job, look. It probably went hot behind the leg, this is a really good exercise, I didn't realize I had this in here. Where did it go? So it got there, gets to the end, and then it goes, bah. Why does it go bah? So I am going to be, I'm scrolling along, shall I get close, I'm using my left arrow on my keyboard, make sure you're-- if you're left and right arrow aren't working, you'll be clicking in the Timeline here. I'm just going to go along until it gets to-- the reason-- there it freaks out, I don't know why, but it's a really good example. 

So let's have a look at this. I'm going to hit Tilde, '~', so this gets big, I'm going to grab all of these guys that are kind of here, when it goes wrong, and backwards, hit 'Del' and just start working on this individually. So let's go, you, we are going to go, oh, my shortcut is for step forward, right? So what we're going to have to do is, go make another shortcut for that step backwards, don't start at the end, because I'm lazy, and I want to do that, I'm going to start at the other end, and just work towards the goodness. So you'll notice that I'm starting at this end, every time you drag it, it's already making a keyframe, if it's not, this needs to be turned on, don't turn it off, you'll lose all these keyframes. 

So let's show you how I would do this now. So I'm going to zoom in, 'H' key for the Hand tool, get kind of close, minus out a little bit, man. So that seems okay, back to my Selection tool, and then my shortcut that I made in the previous video, you might not have this one, remember, mine is 'Option S', go forward one keyframe, 'Option S', 'Option S', 'Option S', 'Option S', it's not that hard, right, especially when it's just a rectangle. How do I know, it's lots and lots of keyframe-- anchor points, I need to keep an eye on this. You can click in here and you can zoom in using your '+' key, you can see, I've already caught up with those missing keyframes. 

There was that gap at the beginning, all gone. So hopefully now, let's have a little look, full screen, full screen, let's go. There's a little bit there that I need to tidy up, can you see, it gets really long. So I need to maybe go and find those keyframes, and just extend it out, every single one, yeah, nice. Two masks on the same Gaussian Blur, on top of the clip. Let's look at one more kind of blurring thing, that I, I do quite a bit of, check it out. 

So the last one is kind of a last minute addition to the class. So just thinking, I use that quite a bit, so let's import it, it's going to be the newly created, we learned it before, screen recordings, I do a lot of screen recordings, and there's some things that just need to be removed. So let's make a sequence from it, and let's say that you've accidentally left your secret credit card details on the screen, and you need to blur that out, or for me, often it's the time and date, I want that removed, don't know why. It's 19th of May, I don't want you to know that, or let's say it's your favorites over here, or it's just something on the screen, but it's consistent across the whole thing, nothing moving, it's just a block. 

The other thing is, is let's say it's been edited a bit, so let's say I cut there, and I cut there, and it's lots of different clips. So you don't want to be copying and pasting them, the Gaussian Blur from one to the other. So what I want to do is, something that kind of like straddles them all. Let's say that there's three different clips, but they all have the wrong-- they have the time that I want to remove, or a bar code, or something private, you want to keep to yourself, your email address, but it's static, so what we can do is, we can apply the Gaussian Blur to an Adjustment Layer. 

So first of all I need an Adjustment Layer, so down here, 'Project Panel', 'Adjustment Layer', it's going to match my sequence, perfect. This is going to be my blurry thing, and I can use this from project to project, which is cool. So I'm going to dump it on top, I'm going to make it the right length, because it needs to go across the whole thing, and I can apply it to this, and it can be, let me show you. So let's add the effect, Gaussian Blur, make it super blurry. 

I'm going kind of fast now, I know, we've done this before, I've just applied it to this, and what we can do with this is we can scale it. So instead of doing a mask and trying to do that sort of thing, it can be nicer just to grab this, and see the size and the scale, you can just make it like a reusable block. Now in terms of the Scale, let's-- where it say Scale here, we can unlink the Uniform Scale, so that we can kind of make it the height we need, not doing direct position yet. So Scale height versus width, so I'm going to do mine, something like this. I'm going to move it up, you get the idea. 

It's just something that sits over the top, and it doesn't matter what's going on, new edits, you're moving things, re-recording stuff, that will always just stay there. It doesn't follow anything, because it can't track it, but it's not meant to. Let's have a look at this, my blur is probably a little hardcore for that. Same thing, if you need it for something else, you can have multiple ones, or at least in this case, let's say that I want to change the position, I want to make it for covering this part, because I don't want people to see what my favorites are, or obviously super secret credit card details. 

So that is it for blurring. What did we do? We did faces, we did logos, number plates, and this one, kind of static things, like credit card details, that's not a credit care, obviously, just a random number I typed. You know that, all right, let's get on to the class exercise, you're like, "Look," Blur 03 coming right up."