Blur and mosaic

Screen recordings are full of things that should not be published: an email address, a customer name, an API key, the contents of a notification.

An overlay clip can be a hiding area. Draw it over the thing, set how strong it is, and it is covered for as long as the clip lasts.

Setting one up

Add an overlay at the playhead with T, choose the hiding kind on the Overlay tab, and drag the box over the thing on the preview.

Shape picks how it hides: a blur, or a mosaic of coarse blocks. Mosaic reads more clearly as deliberate, which is sometimes what you want; blur is less distracting.

Strength is how hard it hides. The default is set high enough that text underneath is genuinely unreadable rather than merely awkward, which is the only standard that matters here.

Leave the animation at None

An area that fades in is readable while it is arriving. The animation note on that tab says so, and it is worth listening to: a blur that takes seven tenths of a second to appear has published the thing it was hiding for seven tenths of a second.

The limit

The box stays where you put it for the length of its clip. It does not follow the thing underneath.

If the page scrolls, or the window moves, whatever you were hiding slides out from under the box and back into the video. When that happens, split the clip and reposition the box for each stretch, or cut the scroll out.

Tracking a moving object is a genuinely hard problem and nobody in this category has solved it. It is on the roadmap, honestly labelled as a big one.

Check it before you publish

Play the whole stretch, at full size, watching the box rather than the video. It takes a minute and it is the cheapest insurance there is.