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  1. Member
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    Oct 2014
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    Boulder, CO
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    Greetings:

    I'm new to this forum, and new to a lot of video techniques in general. Please forgive me if my terminology leaves you a bit confused. I have a need to provide training video for a group that involves real-life emergency medicine episodes. I have a need to filter out, or "gray out" (if that's a term?), faces of patients or those unrelated to the medical emergency for privacy purposes. I'm thinking it would be similar to videos that have been released in the news or on TV where by-standers in police or fire protection video recordings are often masked to protect their identity.

    I can do this easily for stills, and I have learned how to take the precautionary steps of choosing angles such that I try and avoid including a patient's face whenever possible. Again, these are training videos to be shown to a limited audience. I'm hoping there is a relatively easy method, or perhaps some software, that can be used to identify a face or object of interest that needs to be masked out. Certainly, editing a video frame by frame seems extremely tedious, and even if that were necessary, I'm not sure how to do it with the software I have (Adobe Premier Elements).

    Any thoughts or suggestions are certainly welcome. Thank you in advance. My apologies ahead of time if these techniques have been discussed previously and my lack of understanding the terminology prevented me from finding the answers in a search.
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  2. Member budwzr's Avatar
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    Apr 2007
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    You create a still image the size and shape of an oval, and animate it over the face using keyframes. The Oval layer is set to whatever opacity is desired to achieve the look you want, and composited over the face. That's the principle of operations.

    The exact methodology varies by NLE.

    Last edited by budwzr; 24th Oct 2014 at 15:21.
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  3. Member Cornucopia's Avatar
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    Sometimes they're blurred (averaged, median'ed), sometimes pixellated (larger squares), could even be blacked out. You decide which works best.

    Personally, I like to make a much tighter mask, as I hate it when other portions of the background BESIDES the face/intended are blurred. But that's harder work.

    Scott
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  4. Member
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    Oct 2014
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    Scott and Budwzr, thank you both!
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  5. Member budwzr's Avatar
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    I watched "Bad Grandpa" recently, and they had to do this on some of the faces. Probably some people wanted to get a big paycheck. They used a mask very similar to my example above.

    Yeah, a tighter mask is definitely better, it's less distracting. So you can shrink it and tilt it as needed. The more effort, the better the result.
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