In order to help out video creators with post-production issues that may come up in the last second, an inbuilt blurring tool is now available on YouTube. Basically anything that you realize is not supposed to be in your video after you’ve completed recording and editing it, such as car plates, particular faces, objects, or ‘wardrobe malfunctions’ – as YouTube itself puts it – can be blurred out immediately. It’s a great alternative to having to reshoot scenes or dealing with the unfortunate event where someone decides they want to be taken out of a video just after you’re done with it.
The number of content creators on YouTube is constantly increasing, with more and more people deciding to undertake one or more types of video content to their channel. Whether it’s vlogs, social experiments, interviews or even the amateur-level variety, the blurring tool can give creators a last-minute fix to anything that may simply risk ruining your video.
And because you may not even be able to recapture the essence of the original video once again – which is usually the case with a lot of spontaneous shots – this new addition is small but amazingly useful.
A less advanced form of the blurring tool has been part of the offered tools by YouTube before, too. Starting with 2012, the platform offered creators a way to blur faces but they would be limited to that. Now, the tool is a lot more dynamic and easier to use. You can straight out just pause a video, use the box selection tool around the item you wish to blur and then let it run by itself. The drawn selection box will continue to follow the selected object as it detects it moving in the video.
While the proprietary motion tracking algorithms that YouTube has will continue blurring the object that you selected, you will have to manually select the duration that you wish to keep that object selected for. Similarly, you can ensure that the selected area is static and doesn’t follow a particular object. This can be done via the “Lock” option. Similarly, the option can be applied to more than just one object or face present in the video, meaning that you can have multiple blurs happening at the same time, whether the subjects are in motion or not.
This new tool allows creators to protect both their videos and the people featuring in them. It’s a very small yet tremendously useful tool as it can help with preventing claim trademark infringement as well as protecting identities and private data.
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