How to hide a face in a video

There are two blurs in the video editor and they do different jobs. The dial under Look softens the whole frame, which is a mood — a dream, a wash behind a title. It cannot hide anything, because everything behind it is softened equally and your eye fills in the rest.

The patch

Open the Look bench on the shot you want to fix and press Add one under Blur a patch. A round patch appears in the middle of the picture. Drag it onto the face and pull its corner until it covers the whole head — a patch that covers most of a face is a face.

Soft, Misty and Gone are how hard it blurs. Misty is the one to use: it is past recognisable at any size of film. Soft is for something you want hinted at rather than hidden, and Gone is a smear.

Round or Square is the button beside them. A face is round; a number plate, a screen or a name on a parcel is square.

What to watch for

A patch does not follow anything. It sits where you put it for as long as that shot is on screen, so a person who walks across the frame needs the shot cut into two or three pieces with a patch on each. That is a real limitation and it is better to know it now than to find it in the finished film.

What you see on the glass is what lands in the file. The blur is measured as a share of the frame rather than in pixels, so a patch placed on a phone preview is the same patch in a 1080 export — which is not automatic, and was worth getting right.