Why Write A Short Text When One Can Make A Long Video Instead?
I really hate video tutorials. There are very few which are well made and concise. Most of them have a very low information density. Also with the video format one cannot just skim it like one can with a text. I much prefer text with pictures. Also I prefer papers over talks as I can access them with in the way that I like best.
This particular time I had a video where I wanted to obscure some regions. You know this effect from TV shows where they pixelate some face or company logo. The problem is that the object moves on the screen and therefore the pixelated area needs to track the object. This can either be done by hand or automatically.
Using my video editing program of choice, Kdenlive, I have tried this. Quickly I realized that I needed some tutorial. There is a bit in the official documentation about “auto mask”. There is not a lot of explanation, rather just a video. In that video the author shows how automatic tracking works. One basically just selects a region and let the thing do some work. It just did not work out for me so well.
Therefore I wanted something with keyframes, where I can manually adjust the box every few seconds. I let Google search for “kdenlive pixelate” and found only video tutorials. So I took a look into the first one, “Kdenlive Lesson 20 - Blur and Obscure”. The author spends the first minutes to talk about sub-clip selection, which I already knew and shouldn't be the topic. Then he shows how one can pixelate a fixed section of the screen, which does not help me. And only after spending four minutes I heard him say that there is a way to track stuff on screen, but he does not know and is going to look into at some future time. Five minutes wasted.