Premiere Pro CC 2014 review: New features allow video editors to do more

Macworld by Alan Stafford

If you’ve been caught in an embarrassing situation by the local 6 o’clock news crew, then you’ll appreciate that professional video editors often must protect the innocent by obscuring people’s faces in broadcasts, and in some cases, they may need to avoid trademark infringement by blurring company or product logos. A new feature in Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2014 can make that a much less tedious task.

Bad boys, bad boys
You’ve seen it on “Cops,” on “20-20,” even on the local television news—blurred-out faces of people, or blurred-out logos (or offensive statements) on subjects’ T-shirts. Why? It can be to avoid revealing a confidential source, to get someone to talk on camera who wouldn’t otherwise, or simply to prevent a known—and litigious—brand from being accidentally associated with a controversial subject. (Would you want your company’s logo seen plastered on the chest of a just-arrested arson suspect?)

The blurring process can be challenging in video, but Premiere Pro CC’s new Masking and Tracking features aim to make the process a tad easier. Select a clip in the timeline, add an appropriate effect (for example, Mosaic) to the clip, click a button in the Effects Controls panel to create a mask, then resize and position the mask over the offending portion of the video. Click another button to analyze the clip. As Premiere Pro analyzes, it creates a series of keyframes—one per frame. read more...