Adobe Premiere Tutorial: Blurring a Face in a Video with Adobe Premiere

Adobe Premiere Tutorial: Blurring a Face in a Video with Adobe Premiere
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Using Adobe Premiere to Add Effects to Your Videos

Adobe Premiere is a video editing program, generally for professionals and advanced amateur videographers. You can perform different editing tasks in Adobe Premiere, including blurring a face or other object within a video clip. In this Adobe Premiere tutorial, you will learn about blurring a face in a video with Adobe Premiere.

Adding a Filter or Blur Effect

If you want to blur a face in Adobe Premiere, first find a clip with a well-defined, preferably front-facing human face. Next, drag that clip to your timeline. Then, make a copy of that track, and drag it to your timeline. Place the track above your original clip. In Video 1, you will have your original clip, and your copy will be in Video 2.

Select your copy track, add a pixelate or blur effect to it. All of these effects are located within Effects palette. For example, you can add a Gaussian Blur to your video clip. To add a Gaussian Blur, follow the below procedures:

1. Go to Video Effects, and select Blur and Sharpen.

2. In this dropdown menu, select Gaussian Blur.

3. Set your Blurriness. Usually a setting between 25 and 30 will look fine. However, you can change this setting to whatever you want it to be.

Blurring a Face

Now, you will see that your entire image is blurry. If you just want to focus on the face, you need to add a crop filter to your image. Follow these instructions to add a crop filter:

1. Go to Video Effects, and select Transform.

2. In this dropdown menu, select Crop.

3. In the Crop dialog box, you will see settings for Left, Right, Top and Bottom. Adjust these settings until only the face is affected by the blur.

Once you are done with this effect, only the face should be blurred. Note: Always make sure that you are only making changes to the top track. Never select the bottom track. If you accidentally add an effect to the bottom track, undo it immediately. Save your work often in case Adobe Premiere crashes or you experience any type of power outage.

Using Keyframes

You have now made the selected face blurry. However, there is a problem with this effect. If the face that you made blurry moves around often, you need to make the crop bigger to ensure that the entire face stays blurred throughout the video track.

Alternatively, you can take the more complicated route, and use keyframes. Once you add keyframes to your video track, you can view them in the timeline, and you can change the length of the frames in your timeline.

You can also control keyframes within the Effect Controls window, which is located within the Window dropdown menu. Just select your blurred face clip, and open up the Effect Controls. All of your keyframes will show up as diamonds in the Effect Controls window, and you can manipulate them here.

References

MediaCollege.com, https://www.mediacollege.com/video/special-effects/blur/

Striatic, https://www.flickr.com/photos/striatic/5847071/