In this tutorial I'm going to teach you how to blur or censor people or objects
in your videos using two different motion tracking methods. This may be
helpful if you want to publish a video that includes a child but you don't want
to show their face or if you want to censor sensitive information such as a
license plate on a vehicle. Before we get started, if you're watching this video on
YouTube you'll find a link in the description below that will take you to
our tutorial page on the Discovery Center. Here you can download a written
copy of this tutorial to follow along. Let's get started. First I'm going to
show you an easy method to blur the face of a person. In this video I want to blur
the face of this baby playing with his mum. I have VideoStudio opened up under
the Edit tab and I'm going to drag the video of the baby onto the video track
on my timeline. Then with my clip selected I'll click on the Track Motion
icon from the toolbar.
The first thing I'm going to do is drag the red tracker over the boys face, then
we'll click on Apply Mosaic. If you click on the arrow beside it you can
adjust the mosaic shape to either rectangle or circle. In this case I'll
select "circle." Now I can click and drag the nodes on the preview pane to adjust
the size manually to better cover the boy's face with the circle. You can also
adjust the mosaic size here by increasing or decreasing the arrows. The
lower the mosaic size, the more pixelated the effect will be. The higher the
mosaic size, the blurrier it will become. Now click Track Motion and this will
track the movement of the area we've specified so the blur will follow the
boy's face as he moves. Once tracking is done, click OK and now
if we press play to preview our video you'll see how easily we've blurred out
the boy's face throughout our video.
Now I'm going to teach you a more advanced method of how to blur a license
plate using multi-point motion tracking, which you would use to track objects
that change in size or angle as they move closer or further from the camera. I
have a video of a van on the video track on my timeline. I'll make sure the clip
is selected and then click the Track Motion icon from the toolbar. Then under
Tracker Type we'll select "Set Multi-point Tracker"
and on the preview pane we'll click and drag the tracker over top of our license
plate. Then we can click and drag the nodes to adjust them so they fit exactly
over the plate. You'll notice that the multi-point tracker automatically
applies mosaic blur but you can increase or decrease the size of the mosaic blur
as we did in the previous example. Now we're ready to click Track Motion and
make sure to track the entire clip.
As I'm tracking the motion of this van you can see one of the nodes has come
off of its original position so we're going to fix that. All you have to do is
drag the scrubber back or click on the Previous Frame button until you find the
point where the notes begin to trail off. Then re-adjust the nodes to get back to
the original position and click Track Motion once again. You may have to do
this a few times depending on your video clip. Once you're finished tracking click
OK. Now let's preview our video and you can see we've successfully blurred
out our license plate so we can publish this video without worrying about
sharing any private information. If you're watching this video on YouTube
you'll find a link in the description below that will take you to our tutorial
page on the Discovery Center. Here you can download a written copy of this
tutorial to follow along and find other helpful tutorials for VideoStudio.