Hitfilm Express 4 2018 Tutorial

notice when I go to new it brings me to the project page so I'm just gonna leave it at 1080p you can see I have some default options and this is what I tend to use I'm gonna go with the 1080p one if you wanted something where Instagram you can see there's some options here but I'm gonna leave it at this one I'm gonna go right away I'll leave all these options here because I like the default settings and I'm gonna hit start editing here now you I could start with a composite shot here but I'm gonna get into this a little bit later in the tutorial so I'm gonna hit start editing and it's gonna bring open the ready to work screen and it's into the different parts that if you've used other video editors very similar with the layout so what I'm gonna do now actually is just bring some footage in so I can actually show you a little bit better how things

work so this is where my media is going to come in right down here in this corner you can see I have media selected here so I can import the media by just simply clicking on it going to a folder that I have and selecting all the different footage that I have another way you could do it if you have your Explorer open you can just drag I'll just do it this way I'll close this one I'll just open it back this one up again and you can see I can select all this information and drag it in over here so it's just gonna load it up and you can see that right away they have the thumbnail images right inside each of these you can change this so maybe you don't want the large ones you can just click on this and you get more to this one where it shows the icon of what it is you can see I brought in video I brought in audio and I brought in images on this one and I'm going to show you how to work with them all the one thing is what I like to do before I start usually when I drag everything and I actually like to make folders prior to dragging in I just drug everything in at first but if I click

I'm just gonna right click in here and I'm gonna just make a new folder here and so I'm just gonna make my folders and a lot of times so I'll just call it audio and then what I would do is drag my audio you can see how I drag through it and now I can just open I'm gonna create another folder here and you can kind of guess what I'm going to call this and I'm gonna go new folder and I'll just call this one video and I would drag all my video in here so this starts to clean everything up here and then I would have one more for my images on here so that's just how I would start with making you bring in your footage and let's go on and I'm going to bring show you how to do some drag it into the timeline and some basic editing so I got

my video and my images and audio all sorted out into different folders that I find this a lot easier to work with I did the right-click but you can see down below I can do the new folder down here or delete it all so now I'm gonna go to my videos here and I can click on each one to see what each one is if I want to play it I can just simply hit the play up here you know give me a preview of it here so first of all what I'm gonna do with this I'm gonna go to the earth video that I have here and you can see this is about a 15 second just a rotation of the earth here if I hit play oops I'm already at the end here so if I hit play it this is what it is so I only want a piece of this let's say if I wanted to start about here and I'm gonna set it endpoint and then I'm gonna hit play for a little bit and I think I want to go to about here and I'm gonna set an out point so what this allows me to do now I can put it to my timeline so if I click this and it's gonna say hey this doesn't match quite with your settings do you want to make sure it matches I'm going to say yes makes it a lot easier and I'm gonna it goes automatically into the video 1 timeline so if I use my playhead here I can scrub over top of it and you can see how the shortened video here now the video I can still go back to the original and change different things if I wanted to put it in again so the next thing I'm gonna put into here is my intro now I'm gonna just drag my intro across this time so I can the one thing I was going to show you - if I go back to my Earth I put the import in here you can actually drag it down into here straight from it so you don't have to hit the import to here to add to the timeline you can just drag it down below remember anything if you have your selection tool I can select on any of these and if I want them gone I can hit the delete on this one so if I go to my intro now this is my normal teachers Tech intro that I use I'm just gonna

drag it straight across now so the one thing when I drag it straight across so I didn't even have to edit it I can do the editing now over here with the tools that I have so but the first thing I want to do I'm gonna hit play on this does just show you see there's some sound to it this is much too slow I like it faster so I'm going to adjust the speed I'm not going to cut it I'm just gonna make it play faster so I'm gonna go ahead and right click on it you can see I have speed and duration here so speed and duration I have it I can either change it by percentage or I like it I can just change the time so the speed if I wanted it faster I would go above 100% or slower below 100% but for me what I'm gonna do I'm just gonna put it to 3 seconds here and I'll just put 3 in like this and hit OK and see how it shortens everything up and the whole video is there still but now it's 3 seconds long so if you need to adjust any of the timing just simply right click on it like that so I'm gonna go ahead and drag something eltz over to it I'm gonna go to the New Year's Eve one so let's drag and I'm

just dragging into the same video one here I can simply drag it up to so if I drag things up it automatically creates a new video track and since this had audio to it created another audio - on this one so I can drag this around so I can also add more I can right click you can see I can insert my tracks or delete my tracks here but even if you just drag your video or audio over its gonna automatically create those new layers for you to work with so notice if I drag it back to this one it's everything's in this video one but video to track is now there so I'll just leave it in this video one track now if

I play this notice right away since I brought it over this way it's not fitting it didn't even ask me to make the option of changing it you can see this is like 720p and I have things set to 1080 so it's smaller I can grab the corner and hold on and grab it but what I like to do is hold this shift and so everything isn't skewed or makes it easy not to skew it but a quick way to do it would be to right-click on the clip that you want and notice that there's a transform and fit to frame so if I click on that it automatically fills the frame to the right size so just a couple different ways you can adopt it if I hit play on this one you can see there's

some audio that audio and that without maybe you didn't want to listen to it all the time I can go over to the audio and I can just click on it and now if I was working on it didn't delete the audio it just muted the audio so anything if I click the I if I didn't want to see certain video I can hide the track so even everything's still there but it will hide it so if I was working with different tracks if I turn this one off you can see that beginning part is still there but if I scrub over top of this one it's not because I have this I hidden here so those are just some basic things to start with some of the editing importing it into your timeline and making some basic cuts and trims to it so let's take a

look at some of the tools that we're gonna be working with to make things a lot easier looking at the top here where it says editor going down I've been using the selection tool lots already so it's simply clicking on what you want to move it by clicking you can see how it highlights you can move it around you can select multiple clips at once by selecting and everything moves around at once now I can move it that back to the track that I was before it's just going to these ones I'm gonna skip to the bottom here to show you something right here so this timeline scale is something I use quite a bit so as I move it around this allows you to think about like zooming up on a certain part so as your video gets longer and longer you might want to see just be able to see the whole thing at once or see as much as you can and you drag it all the way to the left if you wanted to zoom up on a certain area maybe you're trying to find that detailed cut then you zoom it the other way where you can start looking at things frame by frame so I'm just gonna keep it where I can see everything at the moment so going down here this is a drag tool so what the drag tool allows you to do I'm gonna actually zoom back out and you can see I get this hand as I click now I can just move around on my timeline very quickly to get to different parts and as your video gets longer you might find this comes and very useful I'll just move back to this one so I see more of it again this is the slicer tool and quite quickly I can slice up everything you can see and if I wanted to I can use my selection tool takis make this select that and hit delete and it's gone I can move it back like so whenever you've made a cut or maybe made some changes and you don't want that remember you can go backwards with the ctrl z so on Apple Mac it's a command Z but if I go back you can see how all the cuts that everything disappear one thing about the selection tool that I want to show you too as you get these handles and I'm just going to go to the will go to this one right here the handles notice these blue handles if I click and drag it will shorten the clip so that cuts it off when you get those handles just hang on to the left click and I drag it across and it was short in the clip I'm just gonna go control Z that put it back on it and continue down below so the next one I want to go to is the ripple edit tool so I just showed you what it did with cutting it off the end by the body using the selection tool but this one when I click on it on the ripple make sure I'm on the right one well if I drag this way this time it fills in the gap so as I bring it automatically snaps to it and fills in the gap when you're editing it the other way it left the gap get in between so if you can see now I have a much shorter one this way down below is the snap tool I use this one I usually have this one turned on all the time you can turn it off notice and anything selected it will be in blue this just makes it easier when you're connecting things it just snaps right to it again just make sure that you any of the gaps are gone on it so those just some of the tools that you're gonna use quite a bit to speed things up notice that you do have hotkey options if you go over top of it and all the names are there and there's a letter decided that you can use for the hotkeys on it let's talk a

little odd I own ow so in this time square new year footage here that I have there's some audio attached to it so if I hit play on this one well I have it off right now you notice that the blue speaker wasn't there so now if I have it there very loud like should be for New Year's notice over on the meters on the left how it was into the red I can adjust that very quickly by dragging this down if I didn't want it so loud on this one so if I play it again you can see now the levels are much lower so you can make some quick adjustments to the audio that way too so another thing when I dry these around so if I you notice how they're connected to video and the audio I can unlink these if I right click on this and unlink it now this should be separate so now I can drag the video from it I can even delete maybe the audio I didn't want with it and I just delete the audio so now it's just the video what I can do then maybe I want to bring in some audio that I have so if I bring this one this is just somebody downloaded and I bring it over here and now I have a clip here hit play and again you can see how it might be running a little too high on this one so I can bring it down you can make the same adjustments when you open up your audio files up tops the same thing that I showed you before you can make your in and out points here and then bring it down to this or you can do on the slicer tool just like before you can select different parts of it and cut it remember you can go back with your ctrl Z on it so that's just a little bit about the audio a lot of the effects and everything works the same with the video we'll get into some of the effects that you can add to the video and into audio

next let's move on to some transitions and text but before we do that I want to show you just different ways to look at your H your hitfilm here so if we go up here to the very top if we click this you can get different views or different work workplace spaces now I'm in the classic one right here but if you wanted it to the controls a little bit different you can play around with how you want this but I'll hit for the compositing here and you'll see what happens is the controls and text and track opens up so as we're working as they show you some of the composite things that you might want to try this if you ever want to go back to the original you can reset your layout so but do play around to see what works best for you depending on what you have for your monitor setup and everything right now I'm going to continue using it where I have my controls and history everything's just down here below so right now I want to add a few transitions very easy to use if you go over to your affects here beside of media and I'm RTI tarda clicked on it but if you can see all these different effects they have and I'll show you a few later with the that you better free with HDMI with hitfilm so what I'm gonna do is just go ahead and drag over the transition in between two things so you can see I have an image that I brought in here before just out of my folder that I have and I'll just show you what it looks like prior and it goes from the video to an image now I can just simply grab I'll just do the cross dissolve drag it over and drop it in between you can see how that's highlighted there now if I play it I'll just drag my playhead over you can see how it cross dissolves between it I can select it if it's highlighted I can hit delete and it's gone too so now I'll just be between the two Clips here and remember you can undo with control Z or go up to the top and you have your undo if you want it back where you have your transition like this so anytime you have if you wanted to split you could make a slice then put a transition between but it's just between the two things so if I wanted a split I could drag it maybe between these two here and now you can see if I drag it back and forth how it splits open on it so very easy to add your transitions

between your different media you can also do this on your audio so in this case I'm gonna bring in another audio I'm gonna go back to my media and I'm gonna go to my audio and I'm just gonna drag this over here I'm you're actually gonna drag it under so let's say if I wanted I'm gonna start by playing this and I have the background I've already adjusted it maybe I want it a little louder I'm gonna bring it a little down but then I want music to start playing to fade in what I'm gonna do is I'm actually gonna make a slice here so I'm gonna click on this with my slice I'm gonna click right here so I'm actually in two pieces and what I want to have happened now is I'm going to bring in I'm going go to my effects I'm gonna bring in go to my audio you can see I have a fade I'm gonna bring it over and I'm gonna drop it right here so this is my audio and what I want to have happen and on this piece I'm actually I'm ready to go back there because they didn't want to be on the slice tool and I'm gonna bring this I want this one to kind of disappear because I want this music to start playing so what I have since I put it at the end of the clip it's gonna fade out and the music starts playing but maybe I want the music to fade in I can go back to my effects and drag it here and then so I can have my one thing that is fading out and then this fades in like so that's how you do some transitions on it very easy just drag and drop and you can select it and delete it a different way you can change it also between them is I'm gonna go I'm going to click delete on this one just to show you I'm gonna go over to the control on here make sure I select the

clip I want to be on so let's say on this you notice if I go to controls here I have my clip properties here and I have my transform take a look at the opacity so down here if I click this I won't click it yet I want to make sure I'm gonna move this I'm on the clip I'm bringing it over here and let's see at the very end of this I want to click the opacity and then drag it towards the end of the clip before it goes to the other one that's gotten a little bit too far and now I'm gonna change it so I'm gonna drop it down and notice what's happening here so it's dropping it between it's doing this own fade-out here that I created between the two so you could do this also with audio so whenever you see this circle that pops up and click it adds a keyframe so if I was if I'm gonna move LP with this audio over here and I'll turn it back on so we can hear it so I have to be very let's say at the very end of this I wanted to fade this out over a certain amount of time notice

I have a circle I go ahead and click on it and then go to the end of it and then I just have to adjust it again here to what I would like and you can see the adjustment that's made so if I was playing it at that point it's gonna start to fade out so it gives you a little bit more customisation now to add

text you all have to add a composite shot I could select a certain image or video on this one and add a composit shot directly to this by clicking here and name it but what I'm going to do is a little bit differently so I have it separated from the footage so if I wanted to add text to that specific image right here I could do it here but the way I'm gonna do this is through new over here and go composite shot and I'm just gonna go ahead and name this text it's also said okay I'll leave everything the same and now what it does so it creates this so you can see I can go back to the editor and this is my compass a shot here where I can add many layers of things so I'm just gonna add text here though so if I go new and I'm gonna add text I'm gonna leave this at just 400 by 400 I'll hit OK and I'm just gonna type something in here so I'll double click in here and I'll put happy new years here okay and on this part now if I wanted to move this here's the move up here I could simply drag it around now if I wanted to make some adjustments here take a look over now depending on how you have this set up but my text tools are right here so like I showed you before you could have this set up a little bit differently and you can see I have if I wanted to change the type of font that I have here I could just go ahead and select a different one from here let's do this and you can see it changes I can change the font size and color and so on I could change to how I wanted it to appear so just some adjustments that you can make through here so if I go back and hit it here I'll go back to my media and you'll be able to see I have this text that I created and it's named over here I can go back and edit this every anytime I want if I wanted to change something to it or it's going to be up here too but now I have this text what I can do is drag it above the timeline so you can see I have a Happy New Year's here I can just how long I want it to be so you can make this text independent of your video and make it how you want as I said before you can click on it and add your compasses shot to an individual footage that you want inside your timeline and then it will be connected there too so what it'll create this brand-new shot that you'll be able to see and you over here to the side that you can use on it and as you create more competent shots they'll add across the top here all

right so now time to add some special effects to this a couple different ways you could do this so I've talked about composite shots are ready I'm gonna show you a simple way to add some effects but composit shots are way to add effects to more sophisticated shots but let's start with a simple way here so I'm just gonna go over to effects here you can see right beside media and I'm gonna go if you scroll down to particles and simulation you see lightning electricity I'm gonna drag this right on to this footage that I have right here of the New Year's Eve so I'm gonna drag this over drop it and I have lightning on this notice I get these points here that I can move around in size I have one on the other end that I can change whenever you add something check in your controls so you can see my controls are open here this is where you adjust so I have lightning and electricity if I open this up I have all these different things I can adjust I won't go through them all but if I wanted more trunks to it so now if I hit play you'll see I have this lightning animated on it that I can adjust to it at any point if I wanted to change it rotate it around you can move it so very simply take a look at the different effects that you can just drag on to a part of the video the other way that I was talking about before is you make the composite shot so if I was you could take this individual one right here let's say this image and if I right click I can make composite shot there's a few different ways like I showed you before so now I'll just call this example and I'm gonna hit OK so what it does Dow it actually so it you can see it has come to the shot just like the text up here but if I go back to editor now this is named here we've actually added a audio to it even though there's no audio to get rid of your audio you can just unlink this and since there's nothing there and delete it after but I can go back to it I can double click on it and it will open it up and now this is where you can add many different things so I could add all my effects to through it this way I can add new layers and do different things to each of these and I'm not going to go through it right now with this but you can add all these new layers and that individual clip like I said if you this would be for more sophisticated special effects that you can add to it like tracking and color curves and different things like this but for a simple one what we can do so if I have this selected on here one let's just go to my controls on the specific one I'm gonna open up transform and notice I have anything with a circle like before I can add keyframes to this so if I wanted I could rotate I could change the position let's say I'll just scale it that means so at the beginning it's going to be at this percentage and then if I move it to the end I could drive change it to a different maybe if I only wanted this to be at 50% and all hit there so it's gonna change all the way from here and I could do add motion to it so if you wanted to move around you could go through and add different things so as I go back through it if I go to the editor to see what it looks like if I hit play you can see how it starts to move to it and everything's within this so if I ever want to go back to this and add different layers to this I could do this so it's just a good way if you have a more specific sophisticated effects that you want to add make sure you do it through a composite shot green-screen is

a fun option to work with on hit film very easy to use if you're doing any filming yourself make sure you have lots of light try to get rid of shadows or wrinkles behind you too but in this case I'm just going to take this footage they have I'm going to drag this on here and notice this doesn't even have an audio every time I drag it on it does create audio even though there's nothing there but that's okay I'll just leave it as that I'm gonna take this chicken one I have you can see it has the green screen I just downloaded it off a free place so I'm gonna put this above so I have this chicken and this is all about layers I already had the video two layers so this is on top of the background and I want these chickens walking on the street that I had shown before so what I have to do is I'm just gonna make sure I have that selected I'm gonna go to my effects and scroll down until you find keying and then expand that and then find hue and RGB key so I'm gonna drag this over and drop it on you can see right now it's the chickens that I don't want that up and so what I'm gonna do is expand this and I'm gonna take the dropper and I'm gonna click and hold and bring it over here and I want to take that color green and make it go away so now what I can do is sometimes so you notice sometimes they'll be like little green around the edges you can change the tolerance sometimes that will clean it up a little bit more you can try it you can make a few different options on it if you just kind of go through and make some adjustments maybe even if you wanted it to be RGB versus the U on it but you can go ahead and check you can see that the hue was better for me there and what I'm gonna do now let's say if I want to change the size these chickens so if I click on the screen here and remember I can move things around and I have that layer in the background I maybe I want these chickens smaller now and if you hold down shift I'm not holding down shift it will keep things in proportion better than I ain't like I just did so I'll put these on the crosswalk I'll go even a little bit smaller and now if I hit these I'll just hit play here and that was the end and I have these chickens on the crosswalk eating some food so that's just using some green screen footage with a couple different videos and layers and just making adding the effect to it so a very simple way if you are in green screen with it to do a job and they can do a very good job for you in hitfilm here so all that I have really

left to do is to show you how to export it if you haven't saved it already make sure you can just click rate up top here and you'll notice that you'll have the options to save it make sure you find a place make sure you save it continuously just in case anything crashes on it but first to export it if you go down right to here you should be able to see this is what I'm going to export the content so I'm gonna go ahead click on that so the editor timeline has been added to the expert queue so I'm gonna just go there and go to export and now I have some options that I can do here you can see at any of these I can make a change I'll leave it to YouTube here I can change where my output is the duration is only a minute 34 there so and like I said any of these ones if you click on it you can change the different options so maybe if you just want to die on your desktop I'm just gonna hit cancel on this one and down below I have start exporting down here and I'm gonna click on it and it's starting so at the end of this you're gonna have your mp4 in that location that you picked and then you'll be able to do what you want to upload it to YouTube or do put it into a different place to store or just keep it on your computer so I hope you like this tutorial here today hope to this got you going on hit film Express it's free I think it's a great thing if you're looking for an editor that can do a lot of things if you're looking for other tips and everything just drop a message down in the description now sorry in the comments down below so if you're looking for any other things you want to learn about it but thanks for watching this week and remember I do these weekly tech tips and if you like what you see please subscribe to my channel thanks for watching see you next time