Need help with concealing license plates... Vegas pro 12

Embers829

Wannabie Member
Hey guys,

As the topic says. I have no idea how to do this.
I know it is something to do with masking... But I don't know what all that means.

Any help would be greatly appreciated
 
If it moves around alot in the frame you have to literally go thru and move the mask frame by frame. It's easy, but pretty time consuming. Search youtube for how to mask faces in vegas.
 
Or get yourself a copy of after effects. It has an excellent tracking feature that will track the scale and rotation of the plate, and you can drop an image or a blur over it.

I used to do it manually and it took hours.

Now I can fully blank a 15 min video in about half an hour to an hour.
 
DSN said:
Or get yourself a copy of after effects. It has an excellent tracking feature that will track the scale and rotation of the plate, and you can drop an image or a blur over it.

It's crap :lol:

At least in my experience. I could never get it to track properly and it would go on trips all around the frame exploring the sidewalks and traffic lights - it had a great time.

When I need to blur I use Mocha now which is amazing and is supposedly a professional motion tracking tool for surfaces and CGI.

Although the best way to do it is not to shoot footage where you can read number plates, it will save hours of editing, manually or otherwise.
 
Embers829 said:
Hey guys,

As the topic says. I have no idea how to do this.
I know it is something to do with masking... But I don't know what all that means.

Any help would be greatly appreciated

I've not used Vegas before but if it's anything like Adobe products the manual way to do it would be:

1. Select the first frame where the number plate is visable
2. Create a new layer 'blur layer' with a colour or blur applied to it
3. Move the blur layer so it only covers the number plate
4. Turn on keyframes or position tracking for the blur layer
5. Skip forward 1 - 5 frames. Most likely the blur layer will not be covering the number plate anymore due to camera movement so you should move the blur layer so it is covering the plate
6. Repeat step 5 until the number plate is blurred through the entire footage, ensuring that your previous movements of the blur layer were saved as you go
7. Never shoot footage of a number plate again because you now hate your life
8. Call the suicide hotline
 
ham said:
Embers829 said:
Hey guys,

As the topic says. I have no idea how to do this.
I know it is something to do with masking... But I don't know what all that means.

Any help would be greatly appreciated

I've not used Vegas before but if it's anything like Adobe products the manual way to do it would be:

1. Select the first frame where the number plate is visable
2. Create a new layer 'blur layer' with a colour or blur applied to it
3. Move the blur layer so it only covers the number plate
4. Turn on keyframes or position tracking for the blur layer
5. Skip forward 1 - 5 frames. Most likely the blur layer will not be covering the number plate anymore due to camera movement so you should move the blur layer so it is covering the plate
6. Repeat step 5 until the number plate is blurred through the entire footage, ensuring that your previous movements of the blur layer were saved as you go
7. Never shoot footage of a number plate again because you now hate your life
8. Call the suicide hotline


THIS.
I had to edit my wife's face cause she decided to wander on-set and then proceeded to sit down in-frame. (in my nexx xr1r review vid).
Footage was good, so I couldnt throw it out, and it was already dark, so I couldnt re-shoot, so....
5 mins of face covering that nearly ended me going on a murder spree.
 
Easymode:
Get Adobe creative suite with after effects and mocha
Throw your files in AE and do the automatic tracking in mocha for AE
After the tracking is done, copy and go back to AE
Paste the tracked path and area and throw your pixels, blur or whatever inside
Export to premiere
 
I used to do it manually, frame by frame in Premiere Pro. But now I've learnt how to do it in After Effects, it's 10 times quicker.

I agree with you Ham, that the tracker can go a-wondering pretty often, but I think of it more as an aid than an autopilot. As soon as it wonders, you stop, back up until it is back on track, adjust the 'searchy-tracky-boxy-thingy' and try again.

Used it extensively in this video:



I even got creative and used it to put false 'Lens-flare' on a few plates, just to keep it interesting.

On my next video, any covered number plates are getting my logo instead of a blank rectangle!!
 

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