Secure Redact is a user-friendly tool which lets you quickly anonymise your video, whether it be CCTV footage, body worn camera footage or a livestream. License plates, faces, and tattoos can all be easily detected and blurred out with our machine-learning software. It is an essential tool for ensuring you comply with data protection laws such as GDPR, and helps you handle your video securely and safely!

Today we’re going to talk through a specific functionality within the app - changing the start frame of a track.

What does “changing the start of a track” mean? 

In Secure Redact, all faces and number plates are overlaid with orange redaction boxes. These represent tracks which are a series of redaction boxes that follow an individual up until they go out of frame. These orange boxes show what will be blurred in your final downloaded video. 

However, you may need to change when the redaction begins on a certain individual. I.e. when a track begins. For example, you may want to blur a face for only the second part of the video and not the first. 

Not to worry, you can easily change an existing track to change when it starts to blur a face or object. 

How do you change the start frame of a track?

On the right you have your Tracks panel with all your tracks represented as thumbnails. Double click on the thumbnail of the track you want to edit. This will open up its individual track view and show you the beginning of the track in the video player, with the redaction box in blue (to show you have selected it). 

In the individual track view, you will see the start and end frame numbers of your track. This is where the track begins and ends blurring your individual. 

To change when the track begins, use the video controls to move the video forward to the correct frame you want the track to begin at. You can use the arrows on your keyboard to go frame by frame. You’ll see that the individual track view stays on your right, and the selected redaction box stays blue. 

NOTE: you cannot go backwards, as like the rest of us - unfortunately Secure Redact cannot go back in time! To begin a track earlier than the original track start, you’ll have to add a new track.

Once you have moved forward to the right frame for your new track start, right-click on the blue redaction box covering the face/object and select “change track start” from the drop down menu.  

In the individual track view, the start frame number will have changed to the current frame that you are in in the video player. 

If you have made a mistake or have chosen the wrong frame, you can click the “undo button” if it was the last action you made.

Once you have done all of that, you should be good to go!

Watch the full how-to video below!