Before you start
Decide two things first. Bleep or mute: a bleep is louder and reads as a joke, a mute is quieter and suits interviews, tutorials and anything with music under it. And whether anyone is on camera, because a bleep alone leaves the word on their lips. Then work on a locked cut, because every bleep is a pair of edit points that will drift if you keep trimming around them.
Budget the time honestly. A bleep is a couple of minutes per word once you are quick; a tracked mouth blur is three to six. A twenty-minute video with fifteen swears is an hour. A two-hour VOD with eighty is an afternoon, which is the point at which the last section of this guide becomes relevant. Menu names below are from recent releases and vary a little between versions.
Find every swear with the transcript
- Open Window, Text and the Transcript tab, then Transcribe sequence. Premiere's Text-Based Editing gives you a word-level transcript with the playhead linked to it.
- Type a swear in the transcript search box. Clicking a result moves the playhead to it.
- At each hit press M to add a marker. Repeat for each word and its endings (plural, -ing) and for phrases.
- Step through the markers with Go to Next Marker (Shift+M) as you work.
The transcript will miss a mumbled or shouted word now and then. For anything that matters, scrub the waveform around each marker rather than trusting the text.
00:42no way he just did that
03:17okay that was brilliant
07:55chat, I am not doing that again
12:08what the was that
Bleep a word
- Target only the audio track (click the track targeting on A1 on, V1 off) so the cuts do not touch the picture.
- Zoom in (=) and press Ctrl+K (Cmd+K on Mac) at the start of the word and again at the end. You now have a slice that is just the swear.
- Select the slice and drop its gain: G opens Audio Gain; set it to the minimum. Or drag the clip's volume rubber band to the floor.
- Make a tone: File, New, Bars and Tone gives you a 1 kHz tone. Drag only its audio (the audio-only drag handle in the Source Monitor) onto a free track under the gap and trim it to the slice.
- Match the level. Bars and Tone is far louder than speech; bring it down with G until it sits level with the voice around it.
- Avoid clicks: apply the default audio transition (Shift+Ctrl+D, Shift+Cmd+D on Mac) to both ends of the mute and the tone, and shorten each to two or three frames.
- Repeat for every marker. Two swears close together get one slice and one tone, not two short ones.
Mute instead
Same slices, no tone. Drop the gain, add the two-frame fades, move on. If you have the dialogue on its own track, mute only that track's slice and the music keeps playing under the gap. If the audio is one mixed track, there is no way to keep the music under the word; the whole mix drops for that fraction of a second, which on most beds is less noticeable than a tone.
Blur the mouth
- Target V1 only and add edits at the same two points (Ctrl+K / Cmd+K) so the effect lives only on the word's slice.
- In the Effects panel find Video Effects, Stylize, Mosaic (or Blur & Sharpen, Gaussian Blur) and drag it onto the slice.
- In Effect Controls, click the ellipse mask icon under the effect. Drag the mask over the mouth, feather it, and push the effect hard enough that the mouth shape is gone, not softened: Mosaic at a few dozen blocks, or Blurriness well past 50.
- Under Mask Path, click Track selected mask forward. Watch it. For a head turn or fast movement, set Mask Path keyframes by hand.
- Check at full size. The blur has to hold for the whole word, including the frame before and after.
Mouth, not face. A small mask is less distracting but harder to track; many editors use a slightly larger oval that still leaves the eyes clear.
The faster way
For a short video with a handful of swears, the steps above are fine. Past that, let the censoring be a render instead of an edit. Export the cut as you normally would, upload it to Redactify, pick the preset for where the video is going, turn on mouth blur if anyone is on camera, mark each face once, review the list of catches, and download. The clean file is the same length and frame rate, so you can bring it straight back into Premiere to finish titles and grading, or treat it as the master. Some editors do it the other way round and censor the raw footage before the edit, so every cut and clip starts clean.
Audio costs 1 credit a minute and video with mouth blur 2; new accounts get 30 credits free. Pro accounts can also export the transcript as a redacted .SRT for captions.