Best way of blurring out sensitive footage in Premiere Pro CS6

Written tutorial:

Sometimes you need to blur out sensitive items from your video, like faces of people who don’t want to be recognized, car license plates, product logos, or other things you don’t want your viewer to see. In this tutorial I’m going to show you an example of blurring out the user name of our paypal account. First we need to blur it as we’re logging in, and later we’re going to blur it in a different spot.

Let’s begin by creating a simple box for the area we want blurred. One way is to go to the title editor and using the rectangle tool to draw the shape. Let’s change the color to black just to make it easier to see the box, but the color won’t affect the end result in any way.

Next we’ll simply drag the title on top of our video. We can already see how the black box is blocking the sensitive data. But let’s make the spot blurry, instead of a black box. For that, we’ll convert the title clip to an adjustment layer. When we do this, the black box seems to disappear. But if we apply a gaussian blur effect on it, and increase the blurriness, we can see it’s blurring only the area of the black box. Very cool!

If needed, we can easily animate the blurry area simply by animating the position of our adjustment layer. See how the blurry area is moving southwest when we drag the timeline? I’m going to remove the animation though, and show you how easy it is to re-use this effect on a different clip on the timeline. We’ll simply copy the adjustment layer and paste it on top of the second clip. Now we can adjust the position to make it fit the new target and even scale it to be a bit bigger if needed.

This is a really fast and easy way of blurring out the things you don’t want recognized by the viewer.

Thanks for reading and see you next time on OneMinuteVideoTutorials.com.