From the course: Tracking in After Effects

Using Face Tracking (Outline Only) - After Effects Tutorial

From the course: Tracking in After Effects

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Using Face Tracking (Outline Only)

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- [Instructor] If you want to blur someone's face in a video, you can use another useful option under the mask tracker. This option will recognize a human face, snap the contour of the mask to it, and after the tracking has been completed, you can blur the person's face and include him or her under the witness protection program. Okay, so let me show you how this works. I'm going to start where we left off. This is what we did in the previous movie. And I want to blur this person's face. So let's go to the end here and I'm going to select the clip itself, and then I'll switch to the ellipse tool and draw a very loose mask around his face. Now, in the tracker panel, because the mask is selected, we can use one of the method to track the mask. What we did so far is use the position scale, rotation and skew, and just know that you have couple of other options. Most of them works the same. So depending on the motion in your video, you may want to only work with position, position and rotation. Position, scale and rotation, this default option, which is highly recommended so including the skew, or you can track perspective. But in this case, I'm going to move it to Face Tracking, in parentheses Outline Only. And note what will happen when I'm going to start tracking this mask backwards. After Effects is going to recognize the human face here and just to show you how this works, let's go to the middle of this scene and zoom into the shot, and you can see that although we started up with an ellipse mask that only had four anchor points, After Effects recognized the edges of his face and automatically added those points to the layer and tracked it across the entire frames. Now, this looks kind of funny, looking at this floating head in the air, so let's improve it by selecting the layer and then go to the Effect menu and under Blur and Sharpen, I'll add the Gaussian Blur effect. Once again, I need to zoom in to see what I'm doing. I'll change the bluriness to a value of 20. And by the way, you can also use the Mosaic effect, but I'm going to stick with the Gaussian Blur, and I'm also going to drill down the mask options here and introduce a bit of feathering. Let's go with 10 pixels in this case. Now the problem here is that we actually isolating this mask and not seeing the image underneath. But for every effect that you apply in After Effects, you can use the compositing option and tell After Effects what you want to do with this mask. So in this case, I'll drill down the effects here in the timeline, as well as the Gaussian blur settings and over here you will see these compositing options. I'll click on the plus sign and this will automatically add the mask to the effect and it's just going to calculate the blur here inside the boundaries of the mask. Now you can still return to the mask now that now it says Fx here, as well as give you this icon which illustrates that this mask is aware of its transparent background. So it's only working inside the boundary of the shape. Now we can use the mask expansion if we want to take this a bit outside of the shape that we created, and then let's zoom out, go to the beginning, and press spacebar to preview the result. And now, we have a faceless scooter rider which looks kind of spooky. This is why I'll show you another way to hide some of his features in the next movie.

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