It's not. There's never going to be a tool that does this with black bars.
The only benefit I can think of is legitimacy. Having something blurred there suggests that there was actually something there.
The only benefit I can think of is legitimacy. Having something blurred there suggests that there was actually something there.
Such a great trick. Just write random letters or even random sentences over your handwriting perhaps 2 or 3 times, then heavily cross it out and it's impossible to recover.
I do a lot of screencast videos and what I typically do is put a black rectangle well past the point where my secret text really ends.
If my secret is:
mysupersecretpassword
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However, glitches in editing software can still rarely occur, so for very confidential footage I first censor it, render it out in an intermediary format, check the render to make sure it's 100% correctly censored and then use that rendered footage to continute editing.
Also, mixing/messing with frame rates is an easy way to shoot yourself in the foot.
I'm currently looking at BlackMagic's DaVinci Resolve, which has a quite well featured video and audio editing package for free. But 'all' the free version does is edit video clips. You have to pay for additional functionality. Premiere Elements, in contrast, has lots of useful things like creating/handling non-video assets such as text for titles and credits, loads of (sometimes cheesy) clip transitions, etc etc. Resolve may be okay if you hate Adobe.
You'll need something more sophisticated if you are targeting non-standard playback devices, or want to participate in collaborative workflows, or grade raw sensor clips (assuming you can get this data off your video device). As a real power user you might also want to look at ffmpeg, something I simply haven't had time to get my head round.
Again, YMMV.
[Edit] I consider myself an 'advanced' stills photographer, who is much happier using manual rather than auto settings. When I started with video, however, I quickly discovered how much I didn't know. For example, what is the relationship between the shutter speed of the camera and the frame rate of the video? This was helpfully ignored in the camera's manual, and took some googling to find out. Video autofocus is also pants, on the D850, for the type of wildlife and action photography I like (it always refocuses just as the bird lands). So I'm teaching myself to use manual focusing, just like they do in the movies. A video tripod head was also essential so I could pan, elevate and focus with only two hands rather than three.
The free version lets you create titles, animations, transitions and you get access to their after effects comparable tool for fancy animations as well as color grading and audio / video editing.
It's a very reasonable free offering. I use it all the time to edit podcasts. I want to use it for editing video too but I have issues with it adding artifacts to the rendered videos, I think it's because it doesn't like my 6 year old GTX 750ti.
First, if you add black bars on your own and don't use professional redaction features of software, you might miss the OCR text layer of the PDF, or the bar might be added as a separate object entirely which means it can also be removed later on.
Second, if you don't use monospace text, the width of the text you are redacting will reveal information about it. That's why monospace fonts are so commonly used in the intelligence community for example.
Third, if you just add a black bar to a screenshot, there might be residual values of the text left in adjacent seemingly white portions of the image, but they might not be entirely white due to compression effects. Better you run it through a filter before publishing.
Looking at you, Preview on macOS.
If you do use monospace text, width reveals the exact redacted character count. If you don't use monospace text, it constrains the possible contents in a more complicated way, but it leaks information either way.