Okay, so you have a video, and you want to censor someones face or maybe a licence plate … but how?

Well, first get your copy of Adobe Premiere Pro, preferably version 2.0 … how you get that program is your problem, I won’t go in to details on that.

Anyway, so now you got your copy of Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0? Ok, good. Let’s begin … I’m assuming you know at least the basics of how to operate the program.

Step 1: Import the video file which you want to censor into the program.

Step 2: Put the video file on the timeline.

Step 3: If your video clip has audio attached to it, press the right mouse button on the video clip in the timeline, and select ‘Unlink‘.

Step 4: Look up the spots you want to censor on the timeline. Ok, now use the ‘Razor‘ tool (press C to switch to it) to cut the spots you want to censor, into smaller video clips. Now you can press V to return to using the arrow tool.

Step 5: Select the video clip you just cut out, press CTRL+C to copy it, and then switch video layers, by pressing on ‘Video 2‘ on the left. Now toggle with ‘Page Up‘ and ‘Page Down‘ to make sure you are at the start of the video clip you just copied, and then press CTRL+V to paste the video clip on the other layer.

Step 6: Select ‘Effects‘ in the bottom left menu, and then go to the ‘Video Effects‘ folder, scroll down to the ‘Transform‘ folder, open that folder and select ‘Crop‘ … now drag & drop the ‘Crop‘ effect on to the video clip you want to censor on the ‘Video 2‘ layer. After this go back to the ‘Video Effects‘ folder and scroll up to the ‘Blur & Sharpen‘ folder, open that folder and select ‘Gaussian Blur‘, now drag & drop the ‘Gaussian Blur‘ effect to the video clip, just like you did with the ‘Crop‘ effect.

Step 7: Press on the video clip you put the effects on, and look at the ‘Effects Control‘ menu on the center of the screen. Select ‘Gaussian Blur‘ and set the ‘Blurriness‘ value to something like 10 or higher, depending on how big the thing is that you want to censor and how distorted you want it to be.

Step 8: Now press on the ‘Crop‘ effect and look at the video preview screen on your right, when you’ve pressed on the ‘Crop‘ effect and it’s background is dark, you can now adjust how much you want to crop (or censor) by changing the values or just changing the size of the layer with your mouse arrow, by clicking on the corner of the video preview screen with your left mouse button and holding it down, and then drag the mouse and it will resize.

When you’ve resized it so that it censors that which you want to censor, press on the round symbols that are right next to the ‘Left‘, ‘Top‘, ‘Right‘ and ‘Bottom‘ texts on the left, under the ‘Crop‘ effect on the ‘Effects Control‘ menu. Now press the right arrow key on your keyboard to go forward in the video clip frame-by-frame, and if the thing you want to censor moves, just readjust the ‘Crop‘ effects area, the program will make it move smoothly to the location.

And here’s a slow-motion video of the result:

You can also use a black image instead of the gaussian blur to censor, but I think blurring is more stylish.

And when you’re done, just export the video.

Enjoy! :)