@Jared-S

Hi

Blur modes available in the Effects tab, Video effects:

• Gaussian blur
• Dilate - under Art Filter
• Mosaic - under Distortion
• Artistic blur - under Sharpness

Which you use depends on the effect you want to achieve eg see these tutorials

Masking peoples identities.

Using the Mask generator to create a 'tracking' mask

John EB
Forum Moderator

@Jared-S @johnebaker @CubeAce

Greetings,

When I purchased MS2023 I had NewBlue Essentials with it. These are excellent and I use several of them. It could be that @Jared-S had them with is copy of Platinum; if not then this won't really help.

One effect is called Selective Focus which does what I think @Jared-S wants. The beauty of it is that the amount of blurring and size of the frame can be adjusted and moved throught the length of the clip with keyframes.

AndyW

@Jared-S

Hi,

What do you mean by "background?"

1. The background in a single image like someone would be considered as foreground and everything else background, or
2. The image on track 1 with another image over top on track 2 and you want to blur the image on track 1

John CB

Thank you for the replies, to be more specific I am looking to blur out everything in the frame except the person in it. @CubeAce Where can I learn more about "rota-scope"?

@Jared-S Hi, rotoscoping is drawing on each frame, in your case around a person to create a mask so you can isolate it from the blur fx you've added, if it's a moving object like a person in a video a mask has to be created for every frame, drawing these by hand would be very time consuming & tedious, @browj2 can prob point you to the right tutorial for masking but Xara that will help create the hundreds of frames needed for a moving image, he might know of others, that would prob do you to just isolate a person, I personally use Mocha Pro, unfortunately this doesn't work with Movie Studio & it's expensive, You could have a look & maybe learn something here tho if you wish https://borisfx.com/videos/?tags=product:Mocha%20Pro&search=

@Jared-S

Hi.

@Former user is correct about the rotoscoping if you are trying to do it to a video clip within a video editing package. Rotoscoping is one of about three things within video editing that requires a large amount of processing power to do anywhere near real time and for lesser systems can take many hours to process a few minutes of video.

However if you are trying to do gameplay or a live broadcast type of thing from your home then you could use a couple of free tools that can be used from either OBS Studio, Zoom, or Nvidia depending on what you are trying to do. This is why I asked if you could be more specific.

If you have an RTX Nividia card then you could use the Nvidia plugin. If you have a slightly earlier GTX card that is at the higher end of the GTX family of cards then there is an alternative as seen in this video.

The main nvidia method can be found in this video but you need an RTX nvidia graphics card.

Ray.

@Jared-S

Hi

Taking a couple of steps back before going down the rotoscoping route -

. . . . I am looking to blur out everything in the frame except the person in it. . . . .

What level of accuracy are you looking for eg do you require the blur background to be a perfect fit around the person or a more generalised fit as shown below

John EB

@Jared-S

Hi,

Further to what John EB asked, how much movement is there in the subject.

You can do rotoscoping using Xara Photo & Graphics/Xara Designer Pro X directly from Magix Movie Studio/Video Pro X.

Using Xara with MMS/VPX is documented in the manual. See this tutorial:

and this one:

Contrary to what Ray mentioned, it does not require heavy resources if you use Xara. You are simply creating a series of filled vector images that get tweened (will morph from one shape to a modified shape) between changes. If the image moves a lot and/or you need to mask exactly the image, then you would be modifying the shape every frame. If it doesn't move much or the action is smooth, you can modify the mask every 5th frame or more and let the tweening take care of the other frames.

See this example where I created only one mask around myself sitting on the chair IIRC. I was careful not to move much.

There are some extremely bugs with both Xara and MMS/VPX:

An error message appears when you exit Xara to return to the video editor. It's not fatal, just click it off. The XAR object with the mask will appear in the video editor and work. You can reopen it if you have to make any adjustments.

However, if you save, close the project/program and reopen it, the XAR object will be empty. This has been going on for several years and Magix needs a serious wakeup call about it.

The workarounds are:

Do your work in one session, export the completed part (a range) to mxv and import and use that.

Before closing Xara to return to the video editor, export to AVI with transparency. You can then import this to the timeline in place of the XAR object. You may have to adjust the Size/Position.

John CB

The automatic tracking of at least people and animals should finally be included in MAGIX software.

There are competitors and competing products that can already do this.

At least one is even free.
However, the free one is from the company Bytedance.
This is the company that is also behind TikTok and they don't have a good reputation when it comes to data protection.
Everyone has to know for themselves if they want to use it.

I played around with it and exported a tracked mask that I imported back into Magix.

Then placed over my original video with Chroma Key and set the saturation of the background to 0 (black and white)
It was even still old DV material.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_MCKijvNjAxAFpIp9P2dV4cc94R6gQO1/view?usp=share_link

I can only advise against the Pinnacle Studio software, which also has a tracking function. The results with Pinnacle are completely inadequate. Absolutely useless and totally slow. Pure waste of time !!!

@Marc-Goder

Hi Marc.

It is possible to track an object in both MMS and VPX. The trick to the accuracy is to select a point of high contrast. Preferably a vertical bit of contrast that doesn't change much if possible. If the mask or object you want to follow the tracking point is not in the correct position it can be moved to a closer proximity after pinning with size, position. rotation.

There area lot of apps and programs that promise to mask a moving subject but don't really deliver.

Accurate masking of a changing shape can be done manually but who wants to wade through even 10 seconds of a very complex changing shape at 50 or 60 fps? Even then, if the lighting doesn't match the new background lighting, the effect is far from convincing unless you are using the best tools that can add or match the lighting with AI. It's not that it can't be done but you either need a lot of patience or a lot of money and know-how. It's great for covering up a messy living room in a conference call or for a YouTube post but a lot of hassle for most other applications. Much easier to green screen where possible IMHO.

Ray.

@CubeAce I am using an 11th gen core I5 RTX 3060 16 gigs of ram, and the person being recorded is mostly stationary, the camera is also stationary. With that information would Nvidia be the way to go?

@Jared-S Hi, you need to ask yourself what John EB mentioned 'What level of accuracy are you looking for',

@Former user

As Gid pointed out it depends on the level of accuracy you want but also the nvidia route is for live work and not so much for pre-recorded clips although I'm pretty sure it can be done. There is a good article on how to use it here.

It would seem your system is more than capable and the basic setup has a blur background control.

Ray.

I’m looking for something on par with OK Green-Screen

@CubeAce

I just want to be able to do something like that in Magix without having to switch to another program all the time.
I made the following video with Magix and just CAPCUT in 10 minutes without fine work.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BFi9c2Quxl4rl8bDtY-doTV-BocRwnJF/view?usp=share_link

The second rotating font animation is a bit too wild. Then it doesn't work that well.

@Jared-S

I’m looking for something on par with OK Green-Screen

Then you currently have the best option with CAPCUT.

@Jared-S Hmmm Green-Screen can be very accurate, without your vid already having a green screen background you're going to struggle or have a lot of roto mask work to do, even with Mocha Pro (Plugin version $700, Standalone+Plugin $1500) doing most of the tracking & linking masks to those tracks it would still take a lot of tweaks to get an accurate edge. Boris's Continuum has a Blur & most if not all the filters in Continuum have a built in Mocha/Pixel Chooser masking option but that's $700 for the plugin option & it doesn't work in MS.

@Marc-Goder Just had a look at that CAPCUT, it's amazing what you can get for phones now, just the silly filters are amazing, the tracking & overlay would take ages on a PC yet phones do it very well pretty much instantly

PS I did notice there is a PC version 👍

@Former user

I use the PC version of CAPCUT for Windows.
No program I know has the speed of CapCut.

In Pinnacle Studio, it takes my PC almost 7 minutes to track 10 seconds at 50 FPS. And the results are bad.

In CapCut, my PC needs 100 seconds to track 300 seconds at 50 FPS. And you can work well with the result.

@Former user

Hi,

The Xara solution is a lot cheaper and more accurate as you are drawing around the image and the drawing tool allows you to be precise. When advancing onwards, you only need to adjust the mask where necessary. If there is a lot of differential movement, it's tedious. By that, I mean that various parts of the body are moving in with respect to each other. Someone dancing would require frame by frame adjustments. Where little movement, it's easy and quick. BTW, once you have the outline, it's copied and you just make adjustments, no need to redraw.

Another thing, you can have multiple animated masks at the same time. Can Mocha do that?

Xara has many other uses, some of which you can see in my tutorials. It's a fantastic vector drawing program that is quite simple yet powerful. I have Xara DPX open most of the time, mainly for annotating screen shots.

Programs like Mocha are expensive and of limited use, whereas Xara is not expensive and has multiple uses.

@Jared-S

I suggest that you download the trial version and try it out after watching my tutorials.

@Marc-Goder

I'm trying out CAPCUT now. It looks very interesting.

Does it handle handheld video well (some panning)?

Another EDIT:

No, it doesn't. It had a lot of trouble with my dog.

John CB

@Jared-S

Hi

. . . . I’m looking for something on par with OK Green-Screen . . . .

As @Former user commented - 'Green-Screen can be very accurate, without your vid already having a green screen background you're going to struggle or have a lot of roto mask work to do'

The 'can be' is very true there are videos on YT where green screen has been used and is far from accurate - I would rate it as very poor.

The question of accuracy still stands, and what the background is like - can you export a jpeg image from the video so we can see what we are dealing with - mask the persons face to protect their identity, it is the background that is of interest.

@Marc-Goder

As @CubeAce has commented MMS/MEP/VDL/VPX do have a tracking feature and it can be very accurate - here is a tutorial I did a while ago, tracking the mask is the same principle after decoupling the mask from the object if you use the in program mask effect.

John EB

 

Programs like Mocha are expensive and of limited use, whereas Xara is not expensive and has multiple uses.

 

@browj2 Don't do that, your comment 'can have multiple animated masks at the same time. Can Mocha do that?' shows you know nothing about Mocha, so don't comment about a product you know nothing about, Mocha is used in Hollywood, hundreds of masks can be created, I watched a live streaming of their's where an animated production artist was discussing the hundreds of masks that were created for one of the Disney movies, It has other applications like adding inserts & removal options, I'm not going to go into detail you can look for yourself but there's no comparison, I had Zara for the mth trial, I ended up getting Vegas just so I could have Mocha,

https://borisfx.com/videos/