From the course: Media Composer 2020 Essential Training: 110 Fundamentals 2

Creating a blur effect - Media Composer Tutorial

From the course: Media Composer 2020 Essential Training: 110 Fundamentals 2

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Creating a blur effect

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- [Instructor] For this tutorial, I'm using a new project called Tracking and Blurring. It's incredibly common to need to blur either an entire image or part of an image. In fact, you're probably at some point going to want to blur out someone's face so that there's no issue with them being identified in a video. We'll look at how to combine tracking with a blur effect to achieve that, but first of all, let's look at blurring an entire image. I'm working right now in this TN parkour montage tracking sequence. This is in the student lesson sequences bin. And I'm interested in this last clip in the sequence. I'm going to blur this out so that we could potentially use it as a background for a title sequence. The first thing to do is go to the effect pallette and on the list of effects here I'm looking in the image category for the blur effect. I'm going to drag this effect down onto the clip and I may as well switch over to the effects workspace and this will give us a nice large viewing monitor and easy access to the effect editor. To see the results of the blur effect, you have to first assign a region within the image that the blur should be applied and I want this blur effect to cover the entire shot, so I'm going to use this reduce button to shrink the image within my preview monitor and then I'm going to use these controls at the side of the effect editor to specify the region. I can have multiple regions here, so I've got an oval tool to draw circles, I've got a rectangle tool, I can send backwards and forwards different shapes that I'm using in different layers. I can also reshape existing shapes that I've created, rotate them and just move them around with the selection tool, which you'll notice, is highlighted by default. I'm going to choose the rectangle tool and I'll just lasso right over the image, so I'm completely covering it with the effect. When I do that, the blur controls become available. I have the opacity for the effect, which is kind of like a strength effect, I can make the blur visible or not visible by clicking to enable or disable the option and I can specify the amount of blurring that's applied up to very, very soft or maybe somewhere in the middle. This tool gives us a sense of motion in the shot but we're not distracted by the precise details. Now that I'm happy with the results, I'll click back out of the effect mode and I can see the result applied to the clip. You can tell from the green dot next to the icon for this effect, that this is a real time effect, and so although you could render to improve performance overall, you should be able to see the results right away. Just so I can play this a little bit, I'll mute the music in the background and let's play through this a little. Looks good to me.

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