How to redact faces in a video?
Redacting faces in a video is a must for data compliance, data sharing, and data analytics.
Law enforcement needs to blur the faces of third parties in body worn camera footage for FOIA purposes. Education administrators need to process and share video footage containing sensitive personal information to deal with any incidents between students and/or staff .
Whatever the case may be, Secure Redact has you covered.
Once you have uploaded your media to Secure Redact, all the faces and heads will have orange boxes over them. These are the automatically added redaction boxes and show what will be blurred in the final exported redacted video.
In the panel on the right, you will see all the tracks in the video - this is the Tracks panel.
Quick fire: what is a track?
A track is a consecutive set of orange redaction boxes that follows the same face throughout the video. It allows you to have consistent redaction of that one individual across multiple frames.
You can play through the video or look through the Tracks track panel to double check whether all the faces you want to blur have an orange box overlaid on them. However, Secure Redact of course cannot be 100% accurate and there is a chance that a face can potentially be missed (particularly if it is smaller on the video or the video quality is not great). In this case, manually redacting the face with Secure Redact is a quick and easy process.
First, you need to find where the face you want to blur appears in the video. Once you’ve found the right frame where the individual appears, you are ready to go.
Right click anywhere within the video player and then click “add track”.
You will see a yellow box that you can adjust the size of, and drag to cover the face you need to redact.
You will see the individual track view appear on the right, with the start and end frame numbers. You’ll notice that the start frame is now the same as the frame number you are currently on (i.e. where you added the yellow box).
Then, scroll forward through the frames up until where you want that track to end (i.e. when the face goes out of frame). Then right click on the video player again, and click “Add track end”. This will make this frame the end frame, and another yellow box will appear.
You can flip between the start and end frames by pressing the arrows next to their corresponding numbers in the individual track view.
We should also quickly note the difference between a track and a zone, as those are the two options given in Secure Redact for redactions.
Quick fire: what is the difference between a track and a zone?
While a track is a consecutive set of redaction boxes that move and follow the individual or object throughout the video, a zone tracks a specific area of the video screen and remains static.
When trying to redact an individual’s face, you should opt for a track instead of a zone, as those redactions do not move and will not track the individual.
Once you are happy with the start and end frames corresponding with when your individual appears and disappears in the video, you are ready to go. Press “start” and that track will appear in the processing tab.
This means that Secure Redact is filling in the gaps between this start and end frame, adding orange redaction boxes ready to redact your individual.
Once a track has been processed in the processing tab, its yellow box will turn orange and be added to your tracks panel.
You can double check the track by finding it in the Tracks panel and double clicking on it to open the individual track view. Click the arrow next to the start frame and press play to replay the clip.