How to blur car license plates in Premiere | Tracking masks and blurring

hello this is Christy and today we will look at how to blur car license plates on a video it's very hard to do because if the cars are moving you need to be changing the location of the blur mask to follow the license plates so you cannot do this manually unless it's a very very short sequence so how do you do it so that you don't have to work so hard I'm gonna show you how to do this in premiere and as you've seen I have a video here and I have already done it on this car here this is the sequence and you can see that the license plate is blurred but the other car isn't and this is particularly hard because the car the license plate is moving all over the screen and also comes out in the shade comes out into the light and back into the shade and it's different angles of movement so you couldn't possibly do this manually because it would take you such a very long time so how do you achieve this in premiere I want to show you how to do that as you've seen on this video I have already done this for one of the cars and I want to do it for the other one that comes from afar turns here and goes back so how do you do this on the clip I've added it to my timeline and on the clip you want to add a Gaussian blur effect so go to the effects panel and surfer blur and then choose Gaussian blur from this one and drag it on your clip in the sequence in the timeline now go to the effect controls panel and your Gaussian blur effect is here so how do we make it track and follow the license plate of the car well at the moment the car is not in the frame so I cannot really do much until I see it so the way we will do it on this clip is by fast-forwarding to where the car turns and start to go back so this is about here this is the place where we will start it's okay you go backwards also so we will move the video playhead here and in the Gaussian blur effect on the panel there you have this free draw Bezier tool let me just show you first if I turn up the blurriness obviously that's going to blur the whole video what we want to do is add a mask where this effect applies so I'm gonna turn it down again and I will choose the free draw Bezier I'm not choosing circle or rectangle for point polygons because these are you know it's not exactly straight so I can start with this tool and click on it and then on your video just click on the corners of the area you want to mask like so here you go and now if I turn the blurriness up you will see that only the area in the selection has been blurred so far so good but how do we make this one follow the car around without having to manually adjust it for every single frame if I go forward like this with the mask path you see that the key framing has been turned on for this mask path meaning that if I track it forward I just go one frame forward it is moving with the license plate it's detecting where the license plate pixels are moving and it's changing the mask to follow so all I have to do really from now instead of clicking for each frame is to just click on the other button track selected mask forward and I can click this and premiere is going to play the video forward and it's going to move this mask detecting where the license plate is according to the detected the selection area I created initially and when it's done it's going to hopefully follow the license plate back to its play place you notice I'm tracking forward from this point to the end so it may take a while you can actually track backwards also so we will see how we do this once we've finished tracking this one you notice on this effect timeline here because keyframing is on premier is creating keyframes here you can't see this progress as it's doing it but after it's finished every single frame will have a keyframe with a position of this mask so that's how it's doing it it's following this area that we have defined until the end of the clip so we will wait until it's finished right it has finished now so let's see if the effect is working by playing back moving the play play cursor back to where we started you notice it's not working from here backwards because we have not tracked that part of the video yet but starting here let's play it as you can see the mask is following the license plate and the whole thing remains blurred for the whole duration that's great now you may see that sometimes if it doesn't detect very well or if there are changes in lighting or size it may skew it a bit or turn it left or right it doesn't matter if you're not happy with an area or it doesn't cover an area all you have to do is from that point onwards just move to where the point where the area doesn't blur any more and if you if you want you can adjust it in that point correct it more like and then you can tell it to track again from that point onwards so like you see here I'm adjusting the mask slightly and now I can tell it to track it again from this point onwards so this is how you do correction until you get it all right okay I have finished tracking again from that point onward so you can see now if I deselect this effect here I'm not gonna see the outline of my mask anymore so as you can see my video is blurring the license plate all the way to the end now what do we do about the other part so this is the point where we started somewhere around here okay so this is perfect here now from this point backwards I can do the same and I will open this mask and in this situation I will track backwards that the stuff we tracked forwards gonna stay there and now we will track backwards so that we will move the mask to the first segment of the video the one that the car is coming from afar okay premier has finished tracking the mask all the way to the beginning of the clip so now let's see if the effect has been achieved for the entire duration of the clip I'm gonna fit this one to be larger so let's see I can already see the license plate is not visible this is the point where we started initially and now it's all following it to the end so I hope you enjoyed this tutorial this is a very nice effect and of course you can use this mask tracking not just for blurring you can use it for other objects of other sizes and other shapes maybe you can blur a faces of people although you know it very much depends on the lighting the orientation so you may have to stop at different points and readjust the mask and then tell it to track it to the end but in all cases we have saved a lot of time because we didn't have to track and modify the mask for every single frame and by the way just to tell you this video is actually a 60 frames per second video so I would have spent a lot of time masking this license plate if I needed to thank you for watching I hope you enjoy my videos please subscribe to my channel and see you next time you

Channel: Cristi Cotovan | Graphicious

Views: 13,286

Keywords: adobe premiere blur license plates, adobe premiere blur moving objects, adobe premiere gaussian blur, adobe premiere track mask, adobe premiere track moving objects, adobe premiere tutorial, adobe premiere, premiere pro tutorial, video editing tutorial, masking and blurring, moving mask with video, track mask movement on video, how to blur car license numbers, how to mask car license plates, premiere pro, adobe premiere pro, premiere tutorials, video editing, how to

Id: bvuTEdpccCA

Length: 9min 56sec (596 seconds)

Published: Wed May 13 2020