Privacy Plugin
A Premiere Pro plugin that finds the private things in a shot (faces, addresses, screens, a room you would rather not identify) and keeps them covered for the whole cut. Toggle a class, not a mask.
Private repositoryIn development
Overview
The hard part of anonymising footage is not the blur
Every editing suite can already hide something. Draw a mask, turn on tracking, fix the frames where the tracker slipped, repeat for the next occurrence. That part has been solved for many years.
What is not solved is the accounting. The question on a long edit is never how to blur a face, it is whether every face was blurred.
This plugin works one level up: switch on the categories you never want to see, and everything in them is covered wherever it appears, across a shot or the whole sequence. It sits in the effect stack like anything else in Premiere.
Approach
Handling a complex AI pipeline inside Premiere Pro
Premiere’s UXP runtime cannot host PyTorch, so the plugin uses a UXP panel for the interface and a local Python sidecar for inference. The panel passes clip paths and in/out points; the sidecar reads the media directly from disk.
Detection is split by task. A fine-tuned YOLO model handles most classes, including faces, house numbers, and screens. Text goes through OCR, then regex and NER filtering to selectively mask sensitive information. Arbitrary objects can be selected once and tracked with EdgeTAM.
To keep processing practical, frames are downscaled and detection runs every 2–3 frames, with ByteTrack propagating detections in between. The system is deliberately tuned for over-coverage: false positives are cosmetic; missed sensitive content is a privacy failure.
Pipeline