Censor portions of video with a blur spot or black box

[ramsfan]

I have been searching for this topic on these forums with no luck. What I have is a home video of my kids when they were younger on vhs. I have captured them and they are now avi on my computer. Parts of the video has my son running around in his birthday suit. I want to keep the video and not cut them out completly becuase they are cute but I would like to put a blur spot over his you know what. Kind of like what they do on cops when they blur out the persons face. Is there a way to do that with a Vdub filter or something. Even a black box over it would work. Thanks

[daamon]

Hi ramsfan,

Welcome to the forums.

This would be something that's easily and best done in an editing tool with a bit more capability than VirtualDub. Something like Avid Free DV (and, yes, as the name suggests it's free).

You'd put the footage of your son in Video Track 1 and something as simple as a black box of the required size in Video Track 2.

You'd need to move the black box around to track your son's movement, and the black box could be as simple as a bitmap created in MS Paint. If you're suitable familiar, you might be able to create a blurred circle in Photoshop (or similar) and then have it partially opaque (as required) when placed in the video track.

I've not used Avid Free DV, but I hope there'd be some way of setting the position of the black box.

I hope that helps, good luck.

[bigstusexy]

I also know of a program at http://www.jahshaka.org, with the same name as the domain, it should be able to do this but I warn you, its someitimes finicky its quirky to use and the documentation isn't the greatest. You'll need to go through the tuts to understand about the "desktop" in the program and that you work and save to it and finally render your results to a file

daamon: thanks for aviddvfree I'm going to ttake a good look at it.

[Safesurfer]

If you want to try with VirtualDub there is a filter you can use - Virtualdub Region Remove Filter - this will blur the specified region. If there's a lot of movement this can be time consuming, but it certainly is possible.

[ramsfan]

Wow you guys are awesome. In less than an hour I already got 3 different replies. When I get home I will try the suggestions out. This site has been a great help in learning how to capture/edit videos. I have been transferring VHS to DVD using a combination of a lot of suggestions listed on this site and they are turning out great. Keep up the good work.