There's Got To Be A Way To Do It!

G

Grasshopper

Member
I am editing a project on Final Cut Express 2 and I need to be able to blur someones face out, as the footage was somewhat...unauthorized.

I know I can use a filter on the whole clip and blur the face out, but I do not want to blur the rest of the frame. I need to be able to select a small portion of the frame and apply the effect just to it, as would be done in photoshop.

I suspect it has something to do with the mattes, but I am a total beginner and am not sure how to achieve the desired effect.

Any help on this matter would be most appreciated.

Thanks
 
Re: There's Got To Be A Way To Do It!

You can do it with a plugin but I am not sure how you would do it in just FCP. Then again you might be able to adjust the blur and scale it down the same way you would scale a clip down if the person is walking or moving around you are going to have to keyframe the blur so it will keep up with them in terms of movement.

I believe www.virtix.com has a blur plugin.
 
Re: There's Got To Be A Way To Do It!

Check to see if Express offers any masking ability. FCP has 4 and 8 point masks. Search healp files or tutorials.

Build 2 layers of the same video. Mask the top layer. Apply blur filter to it. Note that you'll need to animate (reposition and keyframe) the mask as the person or camera moves.
 
Re: There's Got To Be A Way To Do It!

I know express can do this, but it's time consuming. I've done it in express 1, but I don't remember EXACTLY how I did it.

I think what I did was to duplicate the footage on a higher layer, trim to just the parts I needed blurred, applied a blur filter...THEN...I put a layer between of black with a punch through...I think I ended up making the hole much smaller then I needed, then enlarging the layer a lot to allow the correct size (this ended up creating a mask that was much larger then the DV frame...usefull in the next step.

Then, I think what I did was keyframe the mask layer (with the blur layer turned off) so that the persons face was showing in the hole...I then went almost frame by frame, adding motion keyframes to keep the face inside the hole.

Once that was finished, I did an alpha blend so that the blur overlayed only within the animated circle.

A few tweeks to the blurr and the fuzzyness of the cutout and I was able to set it to render.

The end result looked just like an episode of cops, it just took a lot of effort.

Hope that helps, sorry I can't remember exact details.
 
Re: There's Got To Be A Way To Do It!

Thanks...that sounds like precisely what I am trying to do. I'll start playing with it this weekend.

Thanks for all your help, guys.
 
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