How To Blur Or Pixelate a Moving Face Or Object In Final Cut Pro

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how easy it is to Blur a moving face or object using Final Cut Pro.

If you're using Final Cut Pro and you've got something in your video that you want to blur, like maybe somebody's face or a license plate, you can do it pretty easily. If you've ever done this with an image, you know, it's pretty easy to select some area and apply an effect to it. But the problem is in a video is that objects move. So, every frame the object is in a slightly different spot. You have to do that for every frame. But fortunately, Final Cut Pro will track an object and apply the blur across your video without you having to meticulously change its position with each frame. 

So let's start with a fresh new library here in Final Cut Pro. I'll just create a sample one here in my movies folder and I'm going to create a new project inside that library. I'll just use the default names. Now I'm going to drag a clip into it. Just a file here. I'm going to drag it into the main timeline. Let's zoom in a little bit here so we can see it. We could see it is two people that are walking and talking. You can see the positions of their faces are changing throughout. So we can apply a blur, but it's going to stay in the same spot. Actually when we first apply a blur, it's going apply the entire thing. Let's do that. I'm going to bring up the effects here on the right by clicking this button. Then I'm going to go to Blur and I'm going to look for Gaussian Blur here. I'm going to drag and drop that onto this. You can see it blurs the entire thing, which isn't what we want. We just want a portion of it blurred. 

So we're going to go here to the Inspector on the right. You've got many different modes for the Inspector so make sure you're on this first one here. You'll see everything that has to do with this selected clip. So the clip needs to be selected here on the timeline. We've got the Gaussian Blur that we've added. You can see it listed here. We could switch it On and Off. Now what we're going to do is we're going to tell Final Cut Pro to only blur a certain area under a shape in the video. I'm going to move away from the first frame here and go somewhere more in the middle, like this. Then I'm going to add the Shape by going to the Gaussian Blur there and I'm going to look for this little button here. Click that. Now you can add a Shape Mask. Now I've got just the blur inside this area here. What I want to do is I want to grab it in here and move it and put it so it is centered right over that person's face. 

I also want to resize it. I can grab any of these three dots here and I can change the shape.  But I'm going to want to grab it and then before I move my pointer hold the Shift Key down. That will keep this circular here. So I'm not just changing the height but I'm changing the height and width at the same time. I want to bring it right over that person's face. Now the area where the blur drops off, it goes to this outer circle here. So I want to grab the outer circle. You have to wait till it's white there. It's a little tricky to grab. I'll bring that in as well, like that. So that looks pretty good.  But notice that it's not following the person. It's only there in that one frame. 

The next thing I want to do is go to Tracker and I want to Analyze. It's going to analyze forward and backwards in the video. It's going to try to follow the object. So you can see how it did it there. You can see here where it drops off in the timeline because that person actually leaves the frame. So I now have it blurring that person's face as they move around like that. I could still go in here, select this track. I could reanalyze and I could change things. I can make the area bigger, for instance, like that, or rotate and it will adjust if I were to change it somewhere and, you know, maybe move it. You could see how it's only in that one spot like that. But the idea is I would make the change there and then I would click Analyze again to recognize a difficult spot. In this case it was pretty easy to follow that one person but in some cases might be harder. So you have to play around with it. 

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Now let's add another video here. This is a typical thing where you want to blur out a license plate, right. So you can see the first license plate is available only to a certain point there at the beginning of the video. Let's get it to somewhere in the middle, like that. So we'll leave the playback head right there. So what I'm going to do here is instead of assigning a Blur, which we certainly could, I'm going to go to Stylize and I'm going to go down to Pixelate. I'm going to Drag & Drop Pixelate onto it. That's going to pixelate everything here. I can set the amount like that. Now I can make it pixelate only under a shape, just like we were doing before. I'm going to go and click the Shape button here and add a Shape Mask. Now, I'm going to take this little white dot here, you see the four green dots, you've got the white dot and you can make this more of a square shape. Now I can actually make it a rectangle. I can center it over the license plate here. Now let's make it fit pretty tightly to the license plate, like that. Let's grab the outer area there. It's a little tricky. You've got to get it to be white there. we can have it not drop off as much or not drop off at all, like that. Now we've got that. But, it is not following it. So we'll do the Tracker again and we'll do Analyze. So now we could see here, over the course of when that car is there, it tracks pretty well. 

But then it starts to track other things. You can see it's still there. So what you want to do is you can go to where it's just about to drop off completely, like right there. I could go in and cut it. Use B to go to Blade. I can Cut and now I've got here two clips. The one that's got the object tracking and the one that doesn't. That's definitely the easy way to deal with that situation when it doesn't recognize that tracking has ended.

So those are the basics of how to do it in Final Cut Pro. It gets a lot more difficult and you have to adjust it a lot more if there is a lot going on in your video. But in most cases I found it works pretty well just doing it automatically. 

Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.