Blur a whole video with a Gaussian blur

Overview

Gaussian blur softens the entire frame, the way a lens does when it is far out of focus. Choose a video and a strength. Light takes the fine detail off while keeping shapes readable; Medium leaves colours and broad forms but no detail; Strong reduces the picture to soft fields of colour and light. Unlike motion blur, it does not depend on anything moving, so a still shot is softened exactly as much as a busy one.

The radius of the blur is scaled to the frame size, so a Medium blur on a 4K video looks the same as a Medium blur on a 720p one instead of being far weaker. The video is re-encoded with the phone's hardware encoder in H.264 or HEVC at its original resolution, with recording metadata kept and HDR sources saved as SDR. Progress and Cancel are shown, the work continues in the background, and a notification tells you when it is done.

The common uses are backgrounds and privacy: a soft version of a clip to sit behind a title, a lower-third or a quote; a blurred copy of a video that shows a screen, a document or a room you would rather not show in detail; an abstract loop of colour and light for a slideshow. For hiding a face or a number plate in a photo, Privacy blur covers chosen areas instead of the whole image. Nothing leaves your device.