How (and Why) I Blurred My Recent YouTube Video

I’ve taken up disc golf as an outdoor hobby during the pandemic. In disc golf, it’s not uncommon–especially for amateurs like me–to lose discs while you play. There’s a pond in St. Louis that has eaten several of my discs. Because of this, disc golfers write their name and phone number on the back of their discs so if someone finds their disc, they can return it to the rightful owner.

This context is important for the rest of this article.

On my game design YouTube channel, in addition to various top 10 lists, I post two videos every week about my favorite mechanisms in various games. I almost always focus on tabletop games, but on occasion I delve into digital games, sports, and random works of fiction.

So last Friday I posted a video about my favorite mechanism in disc golf. In the video, I show all 8 of my discs on camera, front and back.

You can see where this is going.

As several people in the comments pointed out, my phone number is easily visible at several points throughout the video. While I doubt anyone would do anything with my number, I’d prefer not to have that information out there for anyone to use as they wish.

This is what led to me discovering how to blur video content using YouTube video. It’s a surprisingly robust tool. Simply click on the video you want to edit in YouTube Studio, click on Editor, and you’ll see this:

My favorite feature of this tool is that you can choose to either track an object (like a disc that an oblivious person is twirling around on the screen) or to blur a specific part of the screen (like if you have something in the background you don’t want people to see). There’s also a tool not shown here that lets you blur someone’s face, and it will follow them around so you don’t have to edit frame by frame.

The result can look a bit like this:

It took a few minutes after saving for YouTube to update the video, but overall it was still much better than removing the video after people were already engaging with it. And it’s nice that it’s integrated into YouTube so I don’t need to use some other fancy software.

This certainly isn’t my first foray into showing something on YouTube that I shouldn’t have (I’ve shown the bottom of our game boxes several times well before I intended to), and it won’t be the last. I figured I may not be alone here–have you ever made a mistake like this? What do you think of the blur feature on YouTube Studio?

If you’re curious, here’s the full video:

Also read:

• Everything I’ve Learned as a YouTuber
• 5 Low-Tech Tips for YouTube Creators (2020 Edition)

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