blurring parts of a screen capture

[chromeboy007]

Hi,

For a project, I had to do some camtasia capturing and insert these clips into the video. on my screen captures, some of the screen ares need to be blurred out as they contact private info. What is the best way of doing this?

The motion itself is not complicated.. it's just me scrolling up and down the page, but my problem is that sometimes there are quite a few areas to blur.

This is what I have done:

Using Premiere, taking a screen still of the whole frame, cropping it to the area that I need to blur, apply Fast Blur, and animate it according to the movement of the capture. But this results in very odd motion of the blur. I have animated it to the average of one keyframe every 2 to 3 frames and it's still awkward.

Is there a better way of doing this? I tried a masking method in AE, but the mask content squeezes itself as I animate it and it's all messed up.

There is no magic photoshop brush in AE that I can just paint a blur over an area unfortunately.

Would parenting in AE work? I have not tried 4 point motion tracking before... but I will if I have to.

Thanks... all inputs welcomed.

 

[chromeboy007]

Actually.. parenting will not work as I'm not animating the underlying footage....

so I have to motion track it.... but not 4 points as it is 2D....

Edit: I don't know if motion tracking is gonna work either. The tracker point is not sticking to the point that I'm asking it to stick to when I click play to track.... I really need help.

 

[j1clark@ucsd.edu]

Actually.. parenting will not work as I'm not animating the underlying footage....

so I have to motion track it.... but not 4 points as it is 2D....

Edit: I don't know if motion tracking is gonna work either. The tracker point is not sticking to the point that I'm asking it to stick to when I click play to track.... I really need help.

Do you have After Effects?

I usually don't do significant 'effects' in Premiere... but in AE you could have a mask that is tracking the private bits, which makes a window into a blurred out version or just random data in the layer below. With other masking you could have the 'blurred' out region as it scrolls up or down appear to 'go underneath' the screen area as it normally does.

 

[chromeboy007]

Do you have After Effects?

I usually don't do significant 'effects' in Premiere... but in AE you could have a mask that is tracking the private bits, which makes a window into a blurred out version or just random data in the layer below. With other masking you could have the 'blurred' out region as it scrolls up or down appear to 'go underneath' the screen area as it normally does.

Yes in my second post I was referring to AE. I just notice now that I didn't specify.

I did try masking before in AE, but the content inside the mask morphs as I animate it. Even if it doesn't, I still have to animate the mask manually as motion tracking is not 'confidently' tracking my tracking points.

I'm animating the blur manually now, almost every frame is a key frame and it's still choppy!

 

[Phil1076]

You are thinking way too advanced....simplicity is key.

No need for AE.

Stack the track on top of itself and give the bottom track a Gaussian Blur of 75% (or something along those lines). Then just garbage matte or rotobrush out the areas you want blurred out of the top layer.

You can also google "Premiere face blur" or "premiere cops effect"