YouTube the popular video sharing site today offered a new tool for users to automatically blur human faces from the video they upload to YouTube. This feature will protect the identities of people included in the video. Another interesting thing about this feature is that it allows the users to delete the original copy of the uploaded video after the face blur and also have the option, to keep the video as private.
Face Blurring is a new feature in YouTube that allows you to mask the identities of individuals within videos you’ve uploaded. When you apply Face Blurring within Video Enhancements, you will see a preview of what your video will look like with faces blurred. When you click ‘save as’ a new copy of your video will be created in which the detected faces are permanently blurred. Now, you will have the choice to delete the original video at this time. If you do not choose to delete the original file immediately, you may do so at a later time in Video Manager. The face blurring feature may not be perfect, but there is no doubt that it is a first step in the effort to allow you to protect your identity.
How To use face blurring in YouTube
- The first thing to do is, Login to your YouTube account
- Go to Video manager
- On the right of the video you wish to add face blur, click the Edit button.
- You will be directed to video info and settings page, click on Enhancements
- Select Additional Features, which is in just below the video pane.
- You can see Blur All Faces, Click the Apply button below Blur All Faces.
- If you’re satisfied with the face blurring, click Save As.
Face Blurring will not give any guarantee that those face(s) blurred in the videos are not identifiable by others due to the difficulty to detect faces depending on the angle, lighting, occlusions and video quality, it’s possible that certain faces or frames will not get blurred. If you are not satisfied with the accuracy of the blurring as demonstrated in the above screenshot, you can keep your video private. Face blurring is not the finale way to mask faces from identifying, but there are other ways to identify people aside from face recognition, like the place, dress, etc.. But the big problem with the feature is that, you cannot select and blur only the selected faces, instead of it blur all detected faces! YouTube has added a new help page for Face Blurring feature in YouTube help articles. Here is a short video describing how to add face blurring in the uploaded YouTube videos.
Have you checked this new feature? Is it useful or not? Do you have any idea to select and blur some specific faces in a video, instead of all the faces?
