Blur a screen in a video

How to blur a screen in a video

1. 1

   Open the footage

   Bring the clip into the tool above by dropping it in, or tap Choose video on a phone or tablet. The file is read on your device and is not sent anywhere.

2. 2

   Box the display

   Switch to Chosen areas and stop on a frame that shows the entire screen. Drag from one corner of the display to the opposite one, going a little past the edge of the device.

3. 3

   Pick the effect

   If anyone could read what is on the screen, choose Black box. For a TV showing only pictures, a strong Blur or Pixelate can be enough.

4. 4

   Track, time and export

   Select Track movement automatically if the camera moves, and use Starts here and Ends here if the screen turns on or off. Watch the preview through before you select Export video.

Screens that are easy to overlook

While filming, you watch the person in front of the lens, not the glowing rectangle behind them. Before you post, look for these:

• A monitor behind someone on a desk vlog or a video call, showing email, a calendar or a spreadsheet.
• Phones in the hands of people in the shot, with messages, maps or a notification on the lock screen.
• Laptops on café tables, train seats and conference desks, owned by people who never agreed to be filmed.
• Shop and office displays listing customer names, orders, bookings or prices.
• A TV playing a show or a match in the background of a room.
• Reflections of a screen in a window, a mirror or a pair of glasses.

A display that is out of focus can still give away a layout, a logo or a large heading. If you can tell which app is open when you watch at full screen, so can your viewers.

Choosing an effect for a screen

Most private things on a display are words and numbers: an email address, a bank balance, a chat bubble, a file name. Blur and pixelation keep the rough brightness of each line, which can be enough to recognize a familiar page or guess a short number. Black box paints solid black over the area, so none of what was on the display is left in the export.

A TV or monitor showing only moving pictures, such as a nature program or a game, is a different case. There, a strong Blur hides the content but keeps the overall color and brightness of the screen, which looks more natural in a vlog than a black rectangle.

Whichever effect you pick covers every area in that export. For black on a laptop but blur on a TV, cover one of them, export, then open the new file and cover the other.

Keeping the cover on a screen as the camera moves

A handheld shot rarely holds still, so a fixed box slides off the display within a second or two. The fix is Track movement automatically, in the settings of the selected box. It hunts for the same patch of picture in each new frame, working forwards and backwards from where you paused, and stores the positions as it goes.

The tracker compares the middle part of your box in shades of gray. A screen with steady content, like a document or a desktop, gives it plenty to lock on to. A TV showing fast action or a phone being scrolled looks different from one frame to the next, so tracking may stop early and show the time it lost the match.

When that happens, Follow movement is the reliable fallback. Pause at a handful of moments, drag the box back over the display at each one, and it slides between the positions you set.

Each tracking step can make the box a touch larger or smaller, which helps when you walk toward a monitor. Boxes always stay upright, though, and never tilt. A laptop filmed from the side appears as a slanted shape, so size the box to reach its farthest corners, even if that takes in a strip of the desk.

Screens that turn on and off

A phone lights up when a message arrives, a monitor wakes when someone nudges the mouse, and a TV gets switched on halfway through a scene. A dark screen shows nothing, so the cover only has to be there while it glows.

With the area selected, step to the first frame in which the display brightens and press Starts here. Find the frame where it goes dark again and press Ends here. Allow a few spare frames at each end, because many screens fade up and down rather than snapping on.

An area has a single start and a single end. If a phone wakes three separate times, use Add area once for each time it lights up, or leave one untimed area over it, since covering a dark screen does no harm.

Tracking is confined to the span between the start and end you set. Setting them before you track stops it searching frames where the screen is dark and looks nothing like the moment you started from.

Sound coming from a screen

Covering a display changes the picture and nothing else. The audio of a TV, a video call or a ringing phone still plays in your clip. If that sound gives something away, turning off Keep sound under Export settings removes the whole soundtrack, as this tool cannot silence a single source.