DaVinci Resolve 18: How to Blur Part of a Video Clip & Make It Follow Moving Object

You can use the same step by step instructions in this tutorial to simply blur out an area on part of your video, without moving it, just skip the Tracker part. Or follow second set of instructions below.

1. How to Blur Part of a Video Clip:

To add blur to part of your clip:

1. Navigate to Color tab.
2. Select Window button on Color view navbar.
3. Position playhead on frame where you want the blur effect to start.
4. Click on either Rectangle, Circle, Polygon or Gradient shape to add shape to the video clip.
5. Move the shape and adjust its corners to fit around the object.
6. Go to Blur tab and slide blur radius controls up [the red, green and blue lines].

Everything under the ploygonal area will be rendered with blur effect applied.

Now if you want it to follow a dynamic object, you can use Tracker as explained in the next section.

It's exactly the same workflow, but with one extra step.

2. How to Make Blur Follow a Moving Object:

To make your blur follow a moving object in your video:

1. Navigate to Color tab.
2. Select Window button on Color view navbar.
3. Position playhead on frame where you want the blur effect to start.
4. Click on either Rectangle, Circle, Polygon or Gradient shape to add shape to the video clip.
5. Move the shape and adjust its corners to fit around the object.
6. Go to Blur tab and slide blur radius controls up [the red, green and blue lines].
7. Go to Tracker tab and press Track Forward button [looks like play button].
8. Wait for DaVinci Resolve to trace your object.
9. Play the video, blur should follow your moving object.

Here's a quick video explaining how to make blur follow a moving object:

Covering part of a video with a blur can be useful for hiding details like a person's face, license plate on a moving car, logos or copyrighted material. It comes as no surprise that blur effect has always been a popular tool in the world of video editing.

It all starts with the Color tab.

If you want to overlay a blurry area over part of a video clip in DaVinci Resolve first thing you want to do is head over to the Color tab in the bottom navigation bar.

Click on the Color button on the navigation bar to open Color edit mode:

On the Color view, click Window button on the subnavigation bar:

Here you can choose between different shapes for your blur mask. The circle and rectangle seem to be the obvious choices for most tasks.

Placing the shape onto the view to cover part of the video

Clicking on the shape causes it to appear in the center of your video. From here on, you can further modify its appearance by dragging controllers around its edges, or rotate it by anchor point's vector.

Here are examples of some of the shapes (note, they can be used for a variety of other effects, not just adding blur to part of your video):

Note that Resolve limits you to one shape of its kind. Clicking on same shape on the list again will not add second shape of that type. It will toggle it on and off. However, the 5 shapes that can simultaneously appear on the same screen are more than enough to achieve any masking effect.

Adding blur around specific part of the video

Finally, go to Blur tab:

Drag the vertical bar up, on one of the blur radius controls. (On one of the 3 vertical red, green and blue stripes.)

The blur controls are not limited by their size. You can continue dragging the value all the way up, past the top of the stripes and your blur effect will continue to increase to its maximum value.

How to make blur follow a moving object?

Go to Track tab.

Here you can make DaVinci Resolve track the masked object automatically for you. All you have to do is press the "play" (Track Forward) button in separate "track moving object" player controls, as shown in the screenshot example below:

Before pressing Track Forward button it's important that your selection is as snug as possible around the moving object. It doesn't have to be perfect but it does need to be very close to resembling the shape of the object (or your blur effect might not track the object as you intend it to.)

You can adjust the custom rectangle to by moving its corners around the object.

Wait for the video to finish playing and for the tracker to map your area around the moving object.

How to make the blur to perfectly follow the moving object?

Precision of the algorithm depends on whether the moving object changes shape in future frames. If it does, you might want to skip Tracker, just play the movie, and move the blur area (or adjust it) by hand.

If after tracking the blur area doesn't follow the moving object perfectly, you can drag the area around manually with the mouse, and davinci resolve will place keyframes automatically.