YouTube creators can now blur pretty much anything

26 Feb 2016

If you’re a YouTuber in post-production who’s just realised there’s something or someone you definitely don’t want in your video, there’s now a smart blurring tool to hide it.

YouTube offering a blur tool makes sense at a time when the number of people taking to the video-sharing platform to become creators grows on a regular basis.

Whether its obnoxious ‘social experiments’, chirpy blogs or interviews with the public, there’s going to be plenty of people – or objects – that will just ruin an entire video.

That’s why YouTube has announced it’s to expand its blurring tool to allow for any person or object to be hidden behind a blur and tracked across the video.

Blur YouTube flip

YouTube has had a blurring tool for creators since 2012, but this is the first time that it has expanded it from just blurring faces to entire objects.

“Whether you want to blur sensitive information such as a licence plate or cover up a wardrobe malfunction without reshooting an entire scene, the new Custom Blurring tool will let you blur objects throughout your video, right within YouTube,” explains YouTube in its blog.

To use it, the creator just has to use a pretty easy-looking box selection tool around the item to blur, which can be edited in size, and it will then be able to follow it.

Blur YouTube car

Blurred faces image via Shutterstock

Colm Gorey was a senior journalist with Silicon Republic

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