Video Editing Software recommendations

March 1, 2017 9:23 PM

I need to pixelate faces on bodycam footage at work - jerky camera work, jerky people bopping around the frame. Adobe Premiere, kdenlive, CaseGuard Studio... or something else? Please recommend and let me know of your non-fiction video editing experiences.

We already have Adobe Premiere and tried kdenlive too, but this is surprisingly complicated (the tracking isn't working great, low light situations, etc) - work will spring for training if Premiere is the best option. IT have also suggested CaseGuard Studio 4.0 but I'm not sure I can trial it first, and I can't find any reviews or comparisons. Suggestions?

posted by jrobin276 to Media & Arts (3 answers total)

Best answer: At my job we use Adobe After Effects, another part of the Creative Cloud package, for pixelation/censorship blurs. The motion tracking tools are much more developed and key-frameable than those in Premiere but are not out-of-the-box automated like those in CaseGuard.

Now we generally do this work for relatively short sequences in hour-long dramas or half-hour comedies, and not multiple-hours-long footage like bodycam feeds or reality shows like Naked and Afraid. A typical episode of Naked and Afraid takes 50 hours to blur and render completely to meet broadcaster and production company standards. Your standards likely vary (you can get away with large pixelation as opposed to artful blurs which should reduce render time substantially, but beyond that I'm not going to hazard a guess as to the technical requirements for Australian bodycam framerates, resolution and colorspaces).

There are quite a few powerful software compositing packages that will work just as well as After Effects--Foundry's Nuke; Autodesk's Flame, Flare and Maya Composite; and Blackmagic Fusion. These are all expensive in the US, so I can only imagine what they cost in Oz. (Blackmagic Fusion was originally developed in Sydney, so it may end up being a cost-effective and politically-expedient solution.) However, none of these Hollywood tools have chain-of-custody features like CaseGuard, so your office may need to create workflows and develop tools to satisfy the requirements of the various Evidence Acts.

Bottom line, your department will have to cough up some cash for an effective solution.
posted by infinitewindow at 10:26 PM on March 1, 2017 [2 favorites]

Best answer: For this kind of work, I would highly recommend Imagineer's Mocha Pro. I believe there's even a mocha plugin for Adobe After Effects. It has worked wonders for the planar tracking I've had to do in the past.

Download a trial version and see if it works for you. Or, if you have a current version of AE, see if you have the plugin installed. According to the documentation, the plugin comes free along with After Effects.
posted by cleverevans at 11:55 AM on March 2, 2017

Da Vinci Resolve is free (the Lite version is only missing a tiny bit of functionality) and has WAY better motion tracking than After Effects, and it's way easier to use than Mocha (the motion tracking). The only tricky thing is you'll have to roundtrip from Premiere to Resolve back to Premiere (assuming that you do your editing in Premiere first... you wouldn't necessarily want to censor all your raw footage before knowing if you'll even use it).

Motion Tracking (Power Windows) in Resolve

Round tripping between Premiere and Resolve

Resolve is node-based, which can be a bit tricky at first if you're used to layer-based software like Premiere/FCP/AE, but it doesn't take too long to learn.
posted by abrightersummerday at 8:42 AM on March 3, 2017 [1 favorite]