How to Use Video Effects in PowerDirector

PowerDirector's Effects tab covers four quite different jobs under one name: hiding a face, putting something on a person, aiming an effect at part of the frame, and changing the color of everything. They share a settings panel and not much else, so this guide takes them one at a time.

Open the Effects tab. Under Video Effects the sidebar runs Face Blur, Body Effect, Motion, Retro, Haze, Particles and Distortion.

Applying one is a drag onto a clip. Getting back to its settings afterwards is the bit worth memorising: either click the shortcut that appears at the top of the timeline, or click the small i in the lower-left corner of the clip and pick the effect by name. The second route is the one that still works when you have stacked several effects on the same clip.

Effects in the Face Blur category find the faces themselves. Drop one on a clip and open Effect Settings, and a Detected Faces row appears with a thumbnail of each face it found.

Every face arrives ticked. Untick the ones you want left visible, which is the whole point when your subject consented and the passers-by did not: in the shot below one face has been unticked, so he stays sharp while she stays blurred. The Strength slider above controls how heavy the blur is.

To take an effect off again, select it in the Applied Effect list on the left of the panel and click the bin underneath. Deleting from the list rather than the timeline matters once a clip is carrying more than one effect.

The Body Effect category works the other way round: instead of finding faces, it picks out the most prominent subjects in the shot and applies the effect to them. That is subjects plural: where two people are equally prominent, both get it. Each effect brings its own options at the top of the settings panel.

Lower down, Effect mask shows the mask it generated for that subject. When it picks the wrong person, and in a crowd it will, click Select one object beside it to open AI-Based Object Mask and choose for yourself.

The AI-Based Object Mask window prints its own three steps, and they are worth following in order. Click the object in the preview with the selection tool until the blue overlay covers all of it, using the deselect tool to trim anything it grabbed by mistake. Then click Track Object and let it work through the clip. Then OK.

Getting the blue area right before tracking is what decides the result. Tracking a half-covered subject wastes the processing time and you will be back here anyway.

The same masking applies to the style effects, and it comes with a switch that is easy to miss. Invert masked area flips which side of the mask gets the effect, so a mask on your subject becomes an effect on everything except your subject.

That is how you get a stylized background behind an untouched person, which is a far more common ask than the other way round.

The Effect mask row also offers plain rectangular and circular masks. Those can be combined with motion tracking to keep a localised blur or mosaic on something that moves, which PowerDirector covers in its own separate tutorial.

Both change the feel of a shot in one drag, and they are not the same thing.

A filter works by overlay. Drag one onto a clip and it lands on the track beneath the media, adding light leaks, grain, texture, whatever the filter is made of.

A Color Lookup Table, or LUT, changes the color itself rather than covering it. Drag one on and it applies immediately, and Effect Settings gives you an intensity slider to pull it back when the preset is stronger than you wanted.