Blur

Mar 14, 2013

Bill Candland
By Bill Candland

I am importing pictures and video into my trainings. Some of these are examples of employees and employee specific equipment. I am hoping that there is a way to blur faces and equipment ID numbers. I can do this to pictures in PowerPoint, but it is kind of a pain to import, create, then export. Is there some sort of tool that can make a shape that blurs the inside so that identifiers are not identifiable?

15 Replies
Kane Banes
11 years ago03/14/13 at 6:02 pm (UTC)

Hi Bill,

I work for an Australian bank and have the same problem with masking customer bank account and private details. I recently created a course (https://training.hosted-products.net/ANZTransactive/01/) that used screen recordings where I had to mask 100's of different items.

I basically put a white box with a text box over the top to cover up the real information and add the fake info. Problem I ran in to was where on the one slide,  if the recording had a scroll in it I would have to work out how to make the white box/text scroll with it. Instead, I spread it across multiple slides so as that on slide 1, the white box/text is in one position, then on slide two it is in another position depending where the screen recording was up to (already scrolled down). Seemed to give it a consistent flow.

All that being said I have raised a feedback item asking for them to look at including a fill effect of 'blur' which makes it semi transparent but blurs whatever it is placed over - fingers crossed as I mask data heaps!

Good luck.

Kane

Gerry Wasiluk
11 years ago03/15/13 at 9:14 am (UTC)

Bill Candland said:

 I can do this to pictures in PowerPoint, but it is kind of a pain to import, create, then export. Is there some sort of tool that can make a shape that blurs the inside so that identifiers are not identifiable?

Well, you could simply create in PowerPoint and then copy the object in PowerPoint and paste into Storyline.  Does save a couple of steps.  One of the reasons I like to use dual monitors with Storyline.
Bill Candland
7 years ago03/28/17 at 6:57 pm (UTC)

I like Anne's suggestion about Snag It. I have also used some of the textures for shapes in the fill option, then give the shape about a 25% transparency. That seemed to work as well. I work in the transportation industry. When I use videos from vehicles, people tend to bounce around, so the blur option tends to be tricky, but it can work. 

Lya Ryabenko
over 6 years ago11/29/17 at 10:55 am (UTC)

Hello, 

 

the snagit tool in deed is perfect. Hidin with shapes is anything else but easy as stated in the video, considering having to animate these shapes to the miliseconds.... 

But I cannot save a frame as a picture? 

And yet again even if I could, it would be one  picture in a frame of several, so how do I ensure the run of the video being smoothly without investing a lot of time into detail work? 

Paul Tottle
over 5 years ago09/25/18 at 11:05 pm (UTC)

I'm needing to blur some of the characters and poses, to give the impression that the people are anonymous, but could be you. The best I've come up with is to play with increasing the brightness, and dropping the contrast . Gives a washed out look. Another alternative is to put a texture over the top. Not ideal. Would be good if it only worked on the character. (see attached photo)

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