Removing A Liscence Plate Number!

[inspire84]

So say you have a moving car in a shot, and you want to either blur or somehow hide the liscence plate number. What are the best ways recommended on doing this? I tried just a mask and following but for the moving shot, it seems as if it's too noticeable.

let me know
-NOAH S

 

[Matt Grunau]

Depends a little on the kind of shot and duration. If you simply need to blur out a plate number, create and adjustment layer with a fast blur on it, and use the mask to define the area of the blur.

Then keyframe it's position accordingly. I've found that shots like these, I've gotten the best results starting halfway through the shot and drawing the mask there, and then keyframing its position back along the timeline to the beginning, and then forward to the end, using things like mask expansion to control the area. That allows for panning shots, and of course helps as the car moves away, you just take the mask expansion keyframe it lower as the car gets further away. You may speed up the process with a simple motion track of the plate and apply that data to the adjustment layer.

If the shot is handheld, or there is pan and tilt and you want the mask to stay in place and match rotation, and position, set up your tracking options for rotation as well.

I'm not sure what you mean with "it's too noticeable". If you blur the plate out, it's going to be noticeable. If you mean the masked area is not staying with exact rotation of the plate, your best bet is to try the Motion Tracking with rotation.

But, does it have to be that precise? Usually what you see with this kind of thing is a very sloppy region that is just used to obscure the plate numbers. If it moves a little, most instances are kinda "so what" since you are only trying to blur out a portion of video.


It would help if you posted even a low rez version of the footage you are talking about.

 

[Matthew R. Rodwell]

Motion tracking would be a good plan depending on how you shot your video you can make it look really good by taking a license plate image in photoshop and changing numbers around then apply it to the motion tracking.

VideoCopilot has some free tutorials that use motion tracking if you have not used it before.