VID · Video tools

Pixelate Video

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Settings are written to the URL as you change them. Nothing differs from the defaults yet.

Turn a clip into large pixels. The frame is divided into a grid of square blocks and each block is filled with the average color of what it covers. Small blocks give a low-resolution video game look; large ones reduce the picture to abstract color.

Pixel size

Pixel Size runs from 2 to 64, measured on a frame 800 pixels on its long edge and scaled to the real frame size. At 720p output a size of 8 gives 13 px blocks, about 100 across the width. Above 30 or so, detail is gone and only broad shapes and colors remain.

Retro palettes

Original Colors keeps each block’s true average. The palette options snap each block to the nearest color in a fixed set: Game Boy greens, CGA’s four colors, or the 16-color PICO-8, Commodore 64, and DB16 palettes. Combine a palette with a mid-sized block for a clip that looks like it came out of an 8-bit console.

Dithering spreads blocks between two palette colors where the source sits between them. It keeps gradients such as skies from turning into a single flat band, at the cost of more block flicker in motion.

Pixelating for privacy

A fully pixelated frame hides faces and text only if the blocks are large enough. Reconstruction from mild pixelation is possible when blocks are small relative to the feature, especially for text. For anything sensitive, use sizes of 30 and above so each face or line of text sits in a handful of blocks.

Frequently Asked Questions

No. The whole frame is pixelated. Blurring one moving region needs tracking, which this effect does not do.

The block size on a frame 800 pixels on its long edge. The block is scaled to the actual frame, so a 1280 px export at size 10 uses 16 px blocks, and the preview and export show the same number of blocks across.

It is the average of all the pixels it covers. With a palette selected, that average is then replaced by the nearest palette color, and Dithering scatters neighbouring blocks between two palette colors to fake the shade in between.

The block grid is fixed to the frame. When something moves, the pixels inside each block change and so does their average, so blocks along moving edges switch color from frame to frame.

It is copied into the export unchanged when the container can hold its codec, and re-encoded when it cannot. A note under the export button says which happened.

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