How To Blur Out Faces and Text in Your YouTube Videos

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Sometimes you make a video and you realize there's somebody in the video, in the background, that you don't have permission to have their face in the video - and you want to keep the video. You want to make sure you can push it out on YouTube without offending anybody, but you want to blur them out.

Did you know that YouTube can do that in the editor area of YouTube? You can actually blur a face out and the blur will follow them like it is right now. (See Video) Pretty cool, isn't it!

Also, if you're working on a document and you have text in the document that you want to blur out, you can actually do that in YouTube studio as well, to some degree.

Today, I'm going to show you how to do that. And I think if you've never learned how to do this, this is extremely important for you to learn because it gives you so much more power to put a video up onto YouTube without having to edit a whole lot. And, you can do it afterwards - before you publish it!

My name is Zion and I am the founder of the Get Known Service, where we teach podcasters and YouTube content creators how to publish their stuff to the world and 'Get Known' through sharing their journey and sharing value on the interwebs and how to market that and repurpose their content throughout the week so that people know what you do. And you become top of mind whenever people think about your industry or your interest.

If that interests you on how to do it, and our whole strategy, check out the links below. We have a course and we have a service that provides this stuff. Plus I have a Canvas course that's available to you for free. If you want to learn how to use Canva, it's one of the most amazing graphic design tools that's available out there.

All right, without further ado, let's jump into this video and let me show you how to use the blur effect.

(See Video)

So the first thing we're going to do is we need to go into your YouTube studio area. So click after you're signed in. If you have your profile up here, click that, go to YouTube studio from here. We're just going to go to content, which is where all our videos are going to be. And we're going to select the video we want to use. This is just a quick little stock video I uploaded, and we're going to use this as an example.

The first thing I want to show you is how to blur out a face. So we're going to go to editor over here on the left, and we are going to come down to … there's four different rows here of things you can edit. First one is editing the actual clip of the video. You can crop out parts. I have a whole video about that, and you can see that video right up here.

And then you can add music or you could subtract music. You can blur things. Which is just what we're talking about. And then the last one is end cards, which we have another video about.

Let's talk about blur.

So when you hit this little plus sign, you have face blur and custom blur. The first thing I want to do is hit face blur. And so it's going to analyze this video and actually determine the faces that it finds in the video.

So after a minute or two, it actually analyzed that there is a face here. So we're going to select that. There's only one person in this video and it already can tell exactly where to blur the face. Now this blue line represents that it's going to be blurring the face all the way through, but let's say we don't want to blur it the entire time we can actually grab this. And so now when we hit play, once the play head goes over this blue spot, it'll blur out the face and notice it tracks the face as well. That way you don't have to keep moving that around. It's going to blur that face. So this is great.

If you have somebody in one of your videos that you actually didn't get their permission to be in a video, and you just want to blur out their face, you can do this, and it'll just track that person's face. Very, very cool. Just when you do this, make sure that the end of it is actually where you want to end and the start of it is where you want to start. So that's how to blur faces.

So here I have a video of, it's just a stock image video of a woman reading, and I've added some text in a box that's moving across the screen. Like you would many times when you're doing some video editing, let's see if we can blur that out. So the first thing I want to do is find when the text starts, which is about here, and we're going to hit this blur button, we're going to do a custom blur. So it's not face.

And now you can choose between rectangle and oval and the markers right at 2 37. So I'm just going to go put 2 37 in here and it puts it right there. We're going to put this right over this text and expand it a little bit, make it look nice and pretty. And we've got track object in there. So we want track objects because we want it to follow. We don't want to just keep it in one position and let's see kind of what that looks like. Okay. So it didn't quite start quick enough. So let's move that to maybe 2 36 for now. Try that again.

Well, it isn't quite on it, but it's pretty close. Very cool. So it's tracking it and now it looks like it didn't track the second side of that. Now I have learned that this preview - when previewing it, sometimes it doesn't track very well, but once you've rendered it, once you've saved it, it does. So we're going to test that theory out, see right there, it breaks and it doesn't track the text.

So we're going to render this and hit save, and let's see, after it's finished saving, let's see if it actually worked Okay. The video has been processed, so let's check it out. Starts out fine, actually is better. And how it started out, it's tracking perfectly… And fail. So it doesn't track because the movement of the text was too fast.

I've got another part of the video that is a form it's just… I think it's a fish collection form and I'm going to try to blurt part of that out. And I've already rendered this video to have it move around. So like this first part, I think it will get off track pretty quickly because of the quickness of the movement. But let's try that and find out. So let's start at about here. We're going to go custom. I'm going to grab this and we're going to drag it to about there. Let's just start it there. And let's start off with maybe the first line here, first two lines, and I'm going to blur that part of it out. And we're going to just keep it on track object, click save, and then come back and see what happens.

Okay. It's finished saving and rendering, so let's check it out. All right. So it shows that it's blurring it. Didn't resize with the resizing of the form and it's not following the twist of the form. So it appears that this works well. As long as the text, doesn't move too much within the YouTube video and doesn't become too small or too big, too much, because then the blur wouldn't cover the text and you can't be twisting the document around it. Can't follow it. So it's not that smart, but it is. I can see that this would be pretty useful on a lot of different videos, as long as your text, isn't moving too much. (If you have this problem, perhaps consider using a different video clip?).

So let's review. Is YouTube blur function worth it. Absolutely! Does it have issues still? Yes, it does. It's not going to be magically following around every piece of text and face perfectly. Sometimes it's going to break and you need to know what it's doing after you render the video. Make sure you watch back to see if it's blurring the parts you need.

The other thing you want to remember - and do not forget this - is once you've blurred something in your video, you cannot, unblur it. You'd have to repost the video again. You don't want to have to do that. So make sure you validate what you want to blur before you hit that save button. And also, it takes a couple hours to 'save' a lot of times.

If you enjoyed this video, please consider subscribing to our YouTube channel. Follow us, check out our free Canva course below, and I will talk to you next week. See ya.

Zion

 Free Canva course: https://www.getknownstrategy.com/how-to-use-canva

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