Sheryl Plouffe shows how to blur video backgrounds on iPhone using the Blur Effect app. She uses manual touch mode to avoid the automatic blur catching her hairline, then adjusts radius, softness, and strength. The free version exports at 480p with a watermark; the paid version does 1080p.
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So here is the test video that we're going to use to blur out the background. What you want to keep in mind when you're doing this is that you want to be a little bit further back from the actual camera so that you can have enough room here on the sides and possibly even at the top to add that blur effect in, because you'll be doing this with the pad of your finger. If you're too close in, it makes that blurring effect almost too close to your body, and so it doesn't really have that same effect. So let's use this video as a test. To see how to use the blur effect. Okay, so the first thing we're going to do is take our video clip and import it into the Blur Effect app. I'm using an iPhone X. I've already downloaded this app from the App Store, and I'm going to open the app. I'll click on New Edit, and I will find the original video in question, which is this one right here. And I'm going to then hit Done. It's going to process and bring this video clip into the app. This is a short video, obviously, so the processing time is not as long. So we'll wait for that to complete, and at which point we will say, okay, great, I want to add the blur. At this point, we have a variety of different options in the app. We have at the bottom the touch function, or we also have the— it's hard to read, but it looks like it's just the version where it's automatically adding the blur on the top and the bottom of the screen for you. With this particular clip, it doesn't work well because it's bringing that blur effect right into my hairline. So we're going to use the touch function and we're going to do this manually. I'm not going to adjust the, the buttons yet. I'm just going to do it manually with the pad of my finger so that you get a sense of what it looks like. So I'm going to start here on the sides. That's what it looks like. It highlights it for you to show you where you're adding the blur. Now, if I want to increase the touch radius, meaning how thick that radius is where my finger touches, I can adjust that. So let me pull it right over to the top, right over to the right edge. And you can see that that now is touching a much wider area than it had previously. So we'll do this over on the side as well. Okay, there is— you can see almost a little bit of a line there, so I'm going to bring that Touch Edge function over and I'm going to try to soften that up just a little bit around the edges. And it's like any tool that you use, you get used to what works for you, and I'm fairly new to this as well, using this tool. So kind of liking the way that looks. And then the blur strength. If I go all the way to the left, you'll see that the blur disappears. If I bring it back over and over to the right, it's the most blur effect that we can add to this video. So we'll leave it on the maximum for now. We'll hit done. And now I will hit done again and save this. We have an option to download at 480p on the free version or 1080p on the ad-free version, which I've not up— upgraded to yet. I wanted to show it to you in the free version first, so we'll save it as 480p. This is a fairly short clip, so it's not going to take a long time for this to process, and it asks you here not to leave the screen until it's complete. So we will wait for this to complete. The reason why this works is because I'm not moving around very much on the screen. If you have a video clip where you're moving from left to right, it's not going to work as well unless you keep that blur effect wait— oh, there's an ad— if you keep that blur effect right to the outer edges. So it can work, but it really depends case by case on the clip that you are using. I believe that's saved now. So now we will go over to our camera roll and we'll find it here and we'll play that. So here's the test video that we're going to use to blur out the background. What you want to keep in mind when— I'll just pause that. You can see that It's blurred out the background and it does blur out even— there's actually a section here where I'm using my hands. See here when I'm moving my hands into that blurred effect, it does blur out my hands. So that's something you have to keep in mind if you're a hand talker like I am, then that's going to impact the way that it looks. There's also a Made with Blur Effect logo on the screen because I'm not using the paid or the ad-free version at this point. So I hope that that's helpful for you as a tutorial on how you can actually add the blur effect, that depth of field that so many people admire and want to have, but doing it with an iPhone or doing it with a smartphone. I am using an iPhone X in this particular tutorial. Please let me know in the comments if you like this. Give me a thumbs up, a thumbs down. Would love to know your feedback on this. I'm excited about it, and I hope that you'll be able to use this effect for your own videos going forward. So there you go. That's how you add that awesome depth of field and blurred background by using an iPhone. I hope that you've liked this tutorial. You can connect with me on social media @sherylplouffe. You can also download my free gift and it is appropriately named sherylfreegift.com. So go to sherylfreegift.com and you can download my video creation toolkit for 2020 that shows you all the tools that I use and recommend for my own videos and those of my clients. As well as all of the software and programs that I use and recommend. Thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you in the next video.
