Premiere Pro Masking Effects - Blurring Faces

Video Transcription

Hi, this is Margaret with Noble Desktop. Today, we are looking at tracking and effects mask, specifically tracking a mask of a blurred face. Here is a video that includes somebody that did not sign a waiver saying that they wanted to be in this video. Let's say it's this person here with the red shirt, so in order to protect his privacy, we are going to blur his face. 

First, I'm going to do is click on him, and then go ahead over to my effects, and I'm just going to put "gaussian blur" to make life easier. Gaussian tends to be a very nice blur, so I'm just going to double click on that, and that appears in the effects control. It appears there because this is highlighted, so it immediately falls on that clip. 

So, I'm going to first blur it a lot. I'm going to blur the whole clip so the entire clip is now blurred, and now I'm going to choose a mask which will confine that blur. I chose the circle because I am blurring a face, which is circular the most part. I'm going to go ahead and put this on his face, and you might notice that my timeline is just right in the middle of that clip. It doesn't have to be at the very beginning as you'll see when we start. 

Now, when it comes to masking, something to keep in mind is that you need to have a different you have to differentiate between the inner mask and the outer mask. For example, this color of a skin, the clovers here is different than the curve of his skin, and the curve of his shirt, so it has to have a border in which it knows that it's different from. 

So, now I'm going to click on this forward arrow that says "track selected mask forward," and you'll notice that it's tracking it. And keep an eye on my playhead; this has fallen towards the end. So, this whole mask has has worked. I'm going to have to check backwards since I didn't start at the beginning of the clip. I'm going to go ahead and just put the playhead right here, and then say "track selected mask backwards." 

So, that's once I learned one type of design. It didn't really work that well; I didn't many I kind of didn't cover enough of him, so to work with your mask to make corrections, just click on the word mask one in this case. And I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to make this a little bit larger just to give me more room to create a better mask. And you can continuously refine your mask. I didn't put this towards the edge of his face enough in order to make it better. And I'm going to re-mask path it again forward, see how that looks. See where that ended, and I'm going to go backwards and track mask backwards. You don't use these guys; this is just one frame, this is just one frame forward, one frame you generally don't even use those, just stay with the other ones. Let's take a look at this and see once I learned one type of design. All right, not too bad. It may want to be feathered a little bit more over here. Is your mask feather? I had it at 10. 

What type of design? I found it easier to add another masking. This is done in all editing systems, but not all editing systems allow you to track your mask. Final Cut Pro for example doesn't have this capacity at all. 

Hope you've enjoyed this video on tracking an effects mask. This has been Margaret with Noble Desktop.