MacMost Now 481: Blur a Moving Face in Adobe Premiere Elements for Mac

In Adobe Premiere Elements you can blur out an area using multiple layers and a mosaic filter and matte. You can even make that area move along with an object in the video using the timeline and keyframes.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi this is Gary with Mac Most Now, on Today's Episode, I'm gonna show you how to blur a moving object in a video using Adobe Premiere Elements.
So one of the things you just can't do with iMovie is to blur a moving object like say blur out a fact as it moves through a video, but you can do that with Adobe Premiere Elements.
Let's take a look.
So here we are with the sample video project, it's just one video in it.
It's me walking by the camera.
I'm gonna drag that into Video One.
And I'm going to make sure it's expanded enough so that I can see it, there, and we can watch this video.
You can see I walk through the camera, and we wanna blur my face the entire way.
So first thing we wanna do is we wanna copy this video here and move over and paste it over there.
And we're just doing that as a way to then move it onto the second video track.
So we have the first video track and the second video track [in] the same thing, one is just on top of the other.
Now I wanna create a third track but this one is just gonna be a title.
I'm going to select "Title", "New Title", and "Default Still".
Titles are useful for much more than just adding text so I've got the text here, i'm gonna switch to the "selection tool", select the bit of text and remove it so I basically have nothing there as that title.
I'm going to select an oval and make it about the size of my head.
In the middle of the screen more or less.
And this will be the area that blurs out this.
Now let me move this title over here in the timeline and have it match the video length.
Ok so now I'm gonna go to this Video 2, so Video 2 is on top of Video 1.
And I'm going to edit it and add an "Effect".
So the first effect I wanna add to it, uh, is going to be the "Mosaic Effect".
I'm going to type here and you just can't quite see here but this is the "Mosaic Effect".
I'm going to drag it to Video 2.
And that's gonna blur out the entire thing so basically I've got the video in Video 1 is fine but the video in Video 2 is blurred out and the entire this is blurred out.
I'm gonna create a better effect that this I can do that by using the "Edit Effects" button looking at the "Mosaic Properties" and maybe use something a little bit more decent like that.
So you just basically can't quite tell who it is.
Now the next thing I wanna do is I wanna add another effect to Video 2, uh this effect is going to be called, uh, the "Track Matte Key", so I'm going to add that "Track Matte Key" here and add it to Video 2.
Then I'm gonna edit the effects again and see I've go the "Mosaic Effect" and I've got the "Track Matte Key" effect here I'm going to switch it so it uses video 3 as the matte.
So you can't quite see it here but there's a blurry area here .
You can see as I, I kinda walk through it right here.
So what i've done basically is said that Video 2 is only going to be shown in the area of Video 3 and Video 3 is this oval.
So I have the main video is Video One is what you see most of the time and in this small area I have Video 2, that's matted by Video 3.
Now we wanna return to Video 3, we wanna make it move.
 So I'm going to add motion here.
Right now there's no motion over time I'm going to click the animation button.
And now I can go over to the portion here say just as my face appears and move the entire thing so that it's covering my face and you can see it entering in there.
And in fact then I'm gonna go back even earlier and I'm gonna move it out of the frame.
And you can see it's gonna follow me into the frame and into the middle then it'll be left behind I'm going to have it follow me out here.
And then at the end it will (I'm just gonna drag the little pass the) at the end here it's gonna go way off the screen.
 So basically we have several key points here.
It starts on the left, follows my face in, follows it to the center, and follows it out.
Now you can add as many key frames as you need.
So for instance if you wanted to add better coverage here you could at this point uh drag it up, you can uh cover at any other place you want if you think the coverage isn't good, to make it a little bit better.
Now when I play it through, I can see that it will cover my face as I walk by.
 So that's how you do it.
You duplicate the video.
You add an oval as a title.
Then you add "Mosaic Effect" to the second layer of the video, and also matte it to that oval layer.
And then you set an animation with key frames to go across slowly following the face.
So one of the cool things I've seen done with this is instead of using "Mosaic" use something else like say, write in that oval.
So you can have a face stand out in a crowd even as it's moving through.
So I hope you liked this look at a more advanced technique using "Adobe Premiere Elements" from Mac.
Until next time this is Gary, with MacMost Now!

Comments: 6 Responses to “MacMost Now 481: Blur a Moving Face in Adobe Premiere Elements for Mac”

Paul

14 years ago

Can this be done in iMovie??

Gary Rosenzweig

Like I say in the video, not really.

Gary Story

Can this be done in Final Cut Express?

I'm pretty sure, yes. But a different set of steps.

Sorry hadn't watched it when I asked. I think I should watch before asking :)

Would be a nice thing to be able to do in iMove

Nate Great

13 years ago

Hello, I used your tutorial as a guide for masking and blurring out an area in a video.

There is strange behavior in Adobe Premiere Elements 10. If you use the Time Stretch option to reverse the video in Video 2, the video is matted out in only part of the sequence--it is as though using Time Stretch (and checking the Reverse Speed option, 100%), messes up the matte. The first part of the video 2 has the entire video area mosaic'd, but then at some point within the sequence, it changes and most of the video 2 area is matted out correctly, showing only the oval area in mosaic. I have verified that this is not a buffer or render issue.

The motivation behind this is, suppose that you have a segment of video that you copy, paste, and then reverse. Now you want to add a blur effect to that segment of reversed video, just like you did in your tutorial. This is very frustrating problem--I can't figure out why that one video segment would be matted out correctly in only a portion of the segment--it is one continuous video segment with no other mattes, etc., just those you mention in your tutorial.

Any ideas? Any help is greatly appreciated!

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MacMost Now 481: Blur a Moving Face in Adobe Premiere Elements for Mac

Comments: 6 Responses to “MacMost Now 481: Blur a Moving Face in Adobe Premiere Elements for Mac”

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