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How to Redact Any File Type
Practical guides, written to be useful whether or not you use Redactor. Each covers the method, the parts that usually go wrong, and how to check the result.
By File Type
- How to redact a video — detection, review, and why the unit of work is a track rather than a frame
- How to redact an audio recording — finding the span by reading the transcript instead of scrubbing
- How to redact a PDF — including the embedded image a text-only tool cannot see
- How to redact an email thread — headers, signatures, quoted history and attachments
- How to redact a screen recording — on-screen text plus whatever was said aloud
- How to redact a scanned document — OCR, handwriting and skewed pages
Checking Your Work
- How to tell if a redaction is permanent — the single most common failure, and how to test for it
- What to check before releasing a file — metadata, other frames, the audio track, and the things that survive a face blur
The Short Version
If you take one thing from this section: a black box drawn over text is not a redaction. If the content is still in the file underneath the mask, anyone can recover it, and that is how most published redaction failures happened.