Published at: 09 October 2024, 11:42 (UTC+02:00)
Last updated: 09 October 2024, 12:15 (UTC+02:00)

Should my footage be blurred?

Unless you have great reason to not (e.g. consent from whoever is unblurred), yes.

• Recognisable individuals can be in abusive/unsafe situations where mere proof of attendance could get them in trouble or danger
• Cops explicitly need to be blurred in the Netherlands (PDF, politie.nl), and are recommended to be blurred in Belgium (policewatch.be)

Deface

The following guide uses a tool called deface (github.com). This allows you to blur images and videos locally with one command.

Note that this will obviously not look as good as manual blurring in video editing, but it is a good quick and dirty way to get it done.

As of writing, using deface requires some knowledge of how to use a command line. This does mean it supports Linux, MacOS & Windows.

Installation & usage

1. Install any version of Python 3 (python.org) on your system. If asked, add Python to PATH.
2. Open a command line and run python3 -m pip install deface (Note: you might have to use python instead of python3)
3. After this is done, navigate your command line to the image/video file
4. Run deface yourfilename.mp4 --keep-audio --thresh 0.2 --mask-scale 1.2 (note: remove --keep-audio when blurring images)

Done! It will run (for a while, for videos) and then put the blurred file next to the original. If the result doesn't look right, change the number values and run deface again. See deface -h and the deface README (github.com) for all possible options.

Nix users can use the deface package (search.nixos.org) instead of step 1 and 2.

Windows batch script

If you're on Windows, here's an example script that you can drag a file onto from your file explorer.

deface %1 --keep-audio --thresh 0.1 --mask-scale 1.2