I have a video presentation slide with one long text paragraph of ~30 lines of purely black text on purely white background (well, with some font smoothing) that I am using in a presentation video. The whole text itself is in regular font with no special formatting, I definitely do not expect the audience to read it during those 15–20 seconds they see it. Let’s say it’s only the last sentence that I’m actively pointing to and the whole shown text is just to emphasize its quantity.
Now for a reason™ there are two or three words somewhere in the middle of the paragraph that should be “censored” and not be readable at all, even if someone pauses the video and reads the whole paragraph. The video is already done, so I am looking for some solution that can be done directly on the video and not by modifying the slide itself.
Since those words are totally irrelevant to the content of the presentation and I am not expecting anyone reading the lines around them, I want some way of censoring them without catching attention, i.e. when someone sees the slide for the first time, their sight is not attracted by some black bar, huge grayscale pixels, blurred spot, or white island in the text, but they still see a long dense paragraph of text with 99% of the original content.
What would be the best way to accomplish this?
Edit after the answer of @Scott: The used font is proportional, i.e. iiii does not have the same width as WWWW, but the text is long enough so that I can find some other word that has the good width to replace the censored word. Also I’d focus on using the screenshot of the video because re-creating the words from the original font would mean I’d have to match the exact size and proportions of the font transformed to slide and to video. And the main reason is that that paragraph is actually a screenshot from a website, so I even did not choose the font. But provided that I am speaking about a video the whole time, this shouldn’t play a role.
Answer
Replace the word to censor with an equal length innocuous word.
For example, many websites will censor words like “kill” or “fxxx” and substitute “hugs”.
Or substitute “murder” with “lovely”.
Or “shxx” with “love”. Etc…
One could do the same for any word really.
It looks like a standard text flow, but may not read like one.
I would simply format a few replacement images that are 4, 5, 6, 7, or 8 letters in length – whatever will be needed. Then reuse. You could replace any 4-letter word to censor with the same 4-letter replacement.
Of course, with a proportional font, you’d use any word which fills the same relative space, even if the actual glyph count were different.
Me, not being a “video guy” really… I would pause the video and take a screenshot where the text is… edit the screenshot in any image editor (e.g. Photoshop)…
In fact, I would even go so far as retype the entire text… or if it’s from a website, copy and paste the text… Font doesn’t have to match precisely it just needs to be visually similar, if you redo the entire image.
Then replace the entire section of footage by overlaying the edited screenshot on top of the old footage. Any artifacts would then be uniform and editing the entire screenshot would ensure more uniformity throughout… I wouldn’t “patch” pieces of the screen in the video… I’d merely replace the entire screen for that section, but that’s just me.
I’ve done this for disclaimer screens… sometimes rekeying is the best option if quality is the concern. Few, if any, will catch that you didn’t use the exact same font as the original, but many may catch random patchwork.
There may be better, more efficient, methods. As I posted, I don’t really consider myself a “video guy” and my editing knowledge is limited.
Attribution
Source : Link , Question Author : eumiro , Answer Author : MarianD