Blurring face in After Effects CS4

[Elad Menashe]

There are a few ways to do that:
Option A) Create an adjustment layer above the layer you want to blur, animate an ellipse mask to cover the face, and apply blur to the adjustment layer.
Option B) Duplicate the layer which contains the face, on the top layer add the ellipse mask and animate it over the face, apply blur to the top layer.

* you can also try track mattes
* in case there are several faces to blur, create mask per face and animate each, make sure all masks mode is set to “Add”

Hope that helps
Elad

[Jack Firmore]

Ok, so I followed the instructions and I got it to work! Great. One little issue I still have left, is that when I choose a selection with the ellipse tool, and select the face in the video, it sort of takes a picture. By that I mean that whatever area I choose, it sort of makes a copy of that area, and if I try to drag it somewhere else, it keeps that picture/area as blurred, but it still moves the selected area, which is now copied, to wherever I move the area I selected with the ellipse tool. So how can I get it so that it does not copy the selected area, but to instead move along with whatever frame it is on….. if that wording made sense. I have everything the way I need it, almost, its just the area I select with the ellipse tool, that makes a copy of that spot in the video, and whererver I move it to, it keeps playing the area of the video that was first selected on the new area.

[Elad Menashe]

Make sure you move the mask and not the layer.

As a practice do the following:
Create two masks on a layer and try to move only one of them, if both are moving you are moving the layer.

To select a mask press Shift+Click on one of its vertices and then Alt+Click to select the entire path.

[Jack Firmore]

Yep, that did it. Thank you very much for everything, you saved me, and I got to turn it in on time. One last thing. If I wanted to do both mosaic and Gaussian blur on the video, which one would be better and safer to do so. The people interviewed were promised to keep their identity private, so I added the mosaic effect, and added the Gaussian blur, I know that it depends on which one goes on top of which. However, a student brought up that a mosaic blur can be undone with Photoshop video editing, or other video editing, but the teacher never got around to answering that. I did use mosaic, and this statement popped to mind. Is it true that the mosaic can be simply undone? Even with a Gaussian blur? I looked through my saved file, and the way I did it is I put the Gaussian blur on top of the mosaic effect. I was just wondering because a few students used this method. Not wanting to get too concerned, but if the teacher ever puts these videos online, or someone else does this, I just want to double check. Mostly because the information could get those interviewed in trouble with their employers, so I guess we would have to re-do the video. Again, thank you for helping me get this done.

[Elad Menashe]

I’m no expert in the, I doubt whether one can undo mosaic and blur as long as those were heavily used, since those filter cause your footage to ‘lose’ data.
I think your friend watched too many Alias and/or 24 episodes 🙂

Regards
Elad

[Jack Firmore]

Ok, good to hear. Thats what I was thinking, but just wanted to make sure, you never know. I felt good about it, but that little bit of doubt was bugging me. Thank you.