This is the second of 3 tutorials about how to use Pixelan Smart Blur Pro with Movie Edit Pro and Video Pro X.

Smart Blur Pro is a 32 bit and 64 bit plug-in that allows you to blur selectively while retaining desired details, highlights, and edges, yet smoothly blur areas in between. One of the uses is to place a mask over someone and move the mask to follow the person, another use is for smoothing out wrinkles on skin, without affecting the surrounding area or a second person. There are many more possibilities including combining these effects with others.

This tutorial shows how to use the blur parameters to smooth skin and how to use the organic mask combined with a shape mask included in the tool to limit the extent of the blurring or smoothing effect to only specific colours and to a specific area.

I mention in the tutorial that I would further discuss the use of the parameter to add or subtract the spice mask effect  to/from the shape mask. However I did not mention it again due to time constraints. The use of this parameter is somewhat difficult to understand without seeing the combinations and variations of shape and organic masks and the switch off or on, and whether or not the masks are normal (black on white) or inverted (white on black). There are 8 combinations and if there is any interest in seeing an illustrated version of these, please comment and I will add a pdf to this tutorial.

The third tutorial will cover key framing of the parameters and masks using Smart Blur Pro.

Some of the techniques are common to other Pixelan tools. They can be downloaded from the Pixelan site as a trial and tested.

Please feel free to comment and to let me know whether or not this was worth my time and effort.

Note that I am in no way connected to Pixelan, except as a user.