- Here's our complete HitFilm
tutorial for beginners. Previously known as HitFilm Express, this video editor has recently undergone some really big changes. So in this video, we're gonna go through
step by step how to use it, plus I'm gonna share why
this is one of the best free video editing software
right now for Mac and PC. Now as we're going through, make sure you're checking out the links in the description as well. There is a ton of resources down there to help you with your video editing. Okay so I'm over in HitFilm now on a Mac. Now the process here will be
exactly the same on PC as well. And for this tutorial, I am showing you on the
free HitFilm account. Now while there's so much benefit in upgrading to one of the paid plans and they are ridiculously cheap too, the free version is still
a complete video editor. You'll just be missing access to some of the more advanced features and effects and controls. So if you're liking
using the free version, then you might find
there's some big benefits in upgrading down the track. Now the first thing you wanna do is to make sure that you
are actually signed in. So you wanna go to file, options, come down the bottom here to activation and just make sure that
you actually are signed in. So you can see here, I have
a free subscription here. So even if you've just downloaded it and you are using the free version, you do still need to
register for a free account. If you're not signed in that's when you're gonna have issues with watermarks on your finished videos. So we're gonna go OK. We're gonna now create our projects. So you wanna come at the
top here to create new. You can select your video format here from all of the presets. I'm just gonna leave this one here at 1080, 25 frames per second. So I'm matching the footage
that I recorded using my camera. And I'm gonna go down to OK. Now this is what you see
when you first open this up. Now down on the left hand side here, we have the new learn panel. So if you are learning HitFilm, there is some great tutorials
and things built in there, and you can toggle these
on and off at any time with a little learn button up here. So I'm gonna go ahead and turn that off. And then the first thing I'd like to do is come up the top here to window, then down to workspaces
and then choose editing. And that's gonna go ahead
and change the layout to everything back to default settings. Now obviously you can
customize all this up, you can resize windows, you can move things around, or there's some other
presets in here as well, or just to dial this
into your editing style. But for me personally, I like to leave it on the editing
preset or editing default. So up in the top left hand corner here we have access to our library, our media files and our controls, and this will all make more
sense as we go through. In this section here, we've got access to more
settings and controls like your trimer and your audio mixer. This area over here is your
viewer or your playback monitor. This is where you'll be able to preview your edit as you go. You can also access your layers and your export settings here too. Down the bottom here this
big area is your timeline. This is where we will be actually editing. All of your editing tools
and to switch between them is these icons down the side here. And down in the bottom left hand corner, this is where we can
access all of our effects, our history if we need to undo stuff, and also our text panel here too. So we're gonna set these
back to default here, back to trimmer, back to viewer, and I'm gonna go ahead now
and import our footage. So with this tab here set to media, we either wanna right
click on here and choose import, media. We can also go file, import, media, and we wanna go ahead
and grab our video files. Now we can either just
import individual clips or we can select to
multiple clips at a time. So we've got our two camera files there. We can also import the
rest of our Broll footage. So let's bring those in and I will import our
music files here as well. Okay so now we've got all the files that we want to use in our finished video all imported into our media assets here. Now the first thing I'm
gonna do editing wise is grab our primary footage,
this camera one here, drag this down into our timeline onto our video and audio track one. And we can see once that's in there, we've got a preview across the
top here of that video clip, and we've also got our audio wave forms which is the visual representation of any audio in your video. So you can see the areas where I'm talking and the flat line areas are
the areas where I am not. Now we can also see that this
clip is around 38 minutes long on the slider here. So our first step when
we're editing this down is to remove all the bad
takes, all the mistakes, anything that we actually don't wanna have in our finished video. So I'm gonna come into the
start of this clip here, and I'm going to zoom in using either the slider
down the bottom corner here we can drag this in, or I can use the keyboard shortcuts Command + plus and minus, or Control + plus and
minus to zoom in and out, depending if you're on a Mac or a PC. Sound that we're zoomed in,
we can see a bit more detail. So I wanna go ahead and start
our video at this point, just before I start talking here. So if we need to, we can press spacebar to start playing it, or we can hit the play
button up here as well. So we wanna grab this playback head here and move it to just
before I start talking. And then as with most
video editing applications, we've got a few different
tools that we can use to start to remove the
pieces we don't want. Now one way that we can do this is just to come across here
to the edge of the clip, and you can see our mouse cursor changes. I can click and drag back
towards that playback head and I can let it go, and we've now trimmed off
the start of our clip. Now it does mean that
we have this blank space here at the start. We will wanna pick up our clip and move that back to the left, but our video now is going
to start at that point. Now another way that
we can remove footage, let's say that we wanna make
a cut in our timeline here, we can press Shift + Command
+ D to add a cut in our clip. You can see now we've got
two clips, left and right. We can then come across further to where I start talking again and add another cut Shift + Command + D, or Shift + Control + D
if you're on Windows. I can then press delete on the
keyboard to delete that clip. And again, I can click and
drag to close up that gap. Now if I just undo that, pressing Control + Z or Command + Z, the other way that we can do it is, I've still got this clip
here that I want to remove, so we've made a cut on either side of it. With that clip selected, we can press option backspace and that clip will be deleted and it will close up the gap for us. So if I undo that, if we right click on the clip, we can also do the same
by choosing ripple delete. To make cuts in our timeline really quick, we can come over here and
we can grab this blade tool. And you can see now wherever we click, so wherever these gaps are
that we want to get rid of, when we click, it actually creates a cut in
our timeline at that point. Then when we switch
back to our arrow here, we can select that clip,
we can right click, choose ripple delete, and we're able to close up that gap. Now if we jump across to
the end of our video here, we can see I finish talking here and we wanna remove all
of the end of our clip. Likewise as we did at the start, we can grab the end of our clip, we can drag that back to where
we want the video to finish, and our video is now going
to finish at that point. So what you wanna do is go through now add any cuts, remove any bad takes, any mistakes, anything that you don't want
to have in your finished video. And you can use a
combination of those tools and things that I just showed you. Then once that's done, it's a good idea to go
ahead and save your project. So you can come up the
top and choose file, save. Let's just call it Justin Edit and choose where we wanna save it. The desktop is fine for this one. So now we have a working
timeline of just the good stuff, the stuff that we actually
wanna use in our finished video. Now with any of these clips that you've got in your timeline, you can pick them up, you can move them around, change the order of them, literally just by clicking on them and dragging to change up the order. But once you've got your
basic storyline down, the next I'm gonna do is add in any Broll or overlay footage. So if we come up here, we've got another clip
here that I imported. This here is Caleb Logic showing
off the switch pod tripod. I think we had two attempts at this. So we're gonna scrub through here and find the piece of
footage that we wanna use, or the section of this clip. So I'm gonna start at about here. Now I can click here to set an in point or I can press I on the keyboard, and so that's where we
want this clip to start. We can then come across to
choose where we want it to end, maybe just before he picks it back up, so probably about here. We can then press O on the keyboard or hit the mark out point and we can then click and drag this clip from here, down into our timeline. So we wanna drop it just
above our main video track. And you can see now, as we scrub through here
or play through this, we still have our video
playing in the background, so I'm still talking in the background, but this is now shown on top
of it as the video is playing. Now you can see this clip
came in in two pieces. We have our video portion at the top here. We also have the associated audio file down the bottom here too. Now if you don't want the audio, then you can come down here, you can right click on it, and you can choose unlink so
the two files aren't linked. We can then select the bottom one and press delete on our
keyboard and it is gone. So you wanna go ahead now and bring in any Broll or overlay
footage into your project. And you can just grab
the clips from up here and just drag them in their entirety. And then you've got
access to the same tools for editing this down
that we used earlier. So we can just grab the start
of our clip and drag it across until we're finding the place where we want our clip to start, and likewise with the end, and we can add splits and
cuts to these clips as well. So maybe we'll add a cut here, again Command + Shift +
D or Control + Shift + D. Let's cut out this section
here in the middle. Select it, press delete, and
let's move these clips around. Okay, once you've got your Broll
and your overlay footage in next up we're gonna go ahead
and add in any text or titles into our video. There's a couple of different
ways you can do this. If you just want basic text, you can come up here to
where it says new clip, and you can come down and add text, and that's generated an
empty text clip for us. So we can see that we've got
the cursor flashing here. We can just straight away start typing, Justin Brown primal video. Now if we wanna customize this up, we can come over to text
and we can adjust our fonts. We gonna make it Ariel Black. We do need to make sure
that our text is selected. Let's try that again, Ariel Black. We can adjust the size. So you've got all the normal text tools that you would have access to in here. Maybe we reduce the line spacing here, bring that up a bit. We can come back over here
and we can pick this title up. Let's switch over to the arrow selector. We can grab that. We can pull it down to
wherever we would like it. So let's say you can
add really basic text, but also if you come up the
top here to the library, then let's go over to templates. In here there's lots of different
templates that you can use depending on the plan
that you've got access to. On the free plan, there are some templates and things that you can use in here. So for example, this
fancier lower third title, we can download that. So you'll need to hit the
little download button. I've already got this one installed. We want to hit the plus button to add it to our media
library, our media tab. We can come back over to
there, and here it is here. We can then add this on as a regular clip. So let's just drag it down
here a little bit further. You'll see that if we
hit play on this one, it's going to animate in a lot fancier than what we have with
our basic text title. And all of this again
is fully customizable. So if we select on this one, we wanna come over on
this title to controls, and we can see we've got
our title and subtitle. So in title, I could type in Justin Brown, and then over on subtitle,
if we click on that one, let's just type in PV for primal video, just to keep this run quick. And you can see that if
we play this back now, in real time we're now
animating this title with the text that we have just added. Now there's obviously a
lot more of these templates and titles and things that you can unlock with the paid versions of HitFilm, and you can also use services
like Placeit and Videohive to generate motion
graphics like this as well. So you wanna go ahead and
add in any text or titles into your video at this point. Once that's done, we're gonna add in any
transitions or effects into our video. So we wanna come over here to effects, and then down to transitions. Now personally I don't
like to go too crazy. With transitions, they can make
your videos look very cheap. So I say use these sparingly and only when they're
adding to your video. And you can see that there
are some effects in here that say that we need to upgrade. So if we do use these and
we are on the free plan, then you will end up with
a watermark on your video. So if you don't want the watermark, then just use the ones that
are free for you to use. So something like this cross dissolve, if we want to click and drag
this onto our clip here, let's add it to the top of this one here. So now instead of just our clip appearing, our Broll clip at this point,
it is going to fade on. So we just added a simple cross dissolver across fade in on that clip. And you can see we've got
other ones in here as well. Let's go a linear wipe. Let's drag that one onto
this clip down here. So you can see what that one looks like. So if we're playing this back through now, we can see that there is a wipe transition for when that clip comes on screen. So that's what I would use for
our Broll or overlay clips, but in terms of transitions
between our primary footage, if it's a video like this, like
our regular YouTube videos, I wouldn't normally use a
transition between two clips which are pretty much the same, but what you can do to remove that jarring jump
effect between the clips is just to zoom in on one of the clips. So with this clip selected, I wanna come up the top to
controls, down to scale. Now I do wanna make sure
that this is selected, that this is locked so that our proportions are
going to remain constrained. And we want to drag this up. So from 50 let's go up a little bit here. And depending on how you've filmed this, you don't wanna zoom in too much because you could be losing
a little bit of quality, but the idea is that we wanna essentially make this look like a different camera angle, or just change up the shot a
little bit for our viewers. Now in terms of this shot here
where it is just me talking, in order to really sell this effect without it being too jarring, you wanna try and keep the eyes
in a very similar position. So might again make sure
that clip is selected. Try to line up my eyes
a little bit better, little bit closer. So pull it down a bit, maybe move it over to the side, so somewhere around here. So let's see what this looks like now. Yeah, so it's a lot more subtle. It's a lot less jarring. So I would go ahead now in this step, add in any effects and in any transitions, or zoom in on any shots that you need to to finish off this pass. Next up from here, we wanna add in any music and
sound effects into our videos. So I wanna go back up
the top here to media. I did already import two
music tracks in here. Now if you are looking
for music for your videos, where we go for ours is to Artlist who is actually the same
company that owns HitFilm now, and also Epidemic Sound. Those are our top two picks. Now there is also some free music that is included in HitFilm as well. Again depending on your plan, it would dictate how
much you get access to, but you can find that
up here under library, let's go back, and we've got here
music and sound effects. And for both of these, again,
there is a free category. Now I'm gonna go ahead
and use the music tracks that I already imported. I'm gonna grab one of these, click and drag it down to our timeline. Now we don't want to overwrite
any of our clips here. So we wanna pull it down even lower until it is beneath our video. And you can see it's automatically created an audio track three here for us. Now, just like any other clip, we can pick it up or
we can move it around, we can trim off the end so that it finishes at the same time that our video finishes, we can make cuts and make
adjustments as we go through. Now what you'll likely find is that your audio track by default is going to be way too loud. So what you can do before we really dial in the volume levels is just to grab this
white line across here and just pull down a little bit. We will get to audio
adjustments very soon, but you just wanna make
sure that it's not too loud. So when you're playing this back, you can still hear audio from every other clip in your video. So now that you've got
your music in there, you'll probably wanna go back through and play your video again, make any minor adjustments, move any clips around, so that it matches your music
tracks that you have in there. Once that's done, then we're gonna get in to start to tidy up our audio levels. Now the first thing you
wanna make sure is correct is any spoken pieces in your video. So we wanna go ahead and we're gonna mute any
of our sound effects, or any of our music tracks. So I can hit the little
speaker here on both of these, and this has now muted our
audio track layer two and three. So we're only going to
hear our primary audio which is me talking. Now we do have the ability to either adjust our volume levels
on a clip by clip basis. So we can manually adjust each one, and we can either do it both
by grabbing this white line and lifting it up and down for each clip, or we can actually do it
on the entire track level. So if we're doing it on a track level, which is what I would do
in a scenario like this, where it's all the same
clip, same microphone, so the volume levels should
be pretty much the same, I would just want to increase or lower the volume on this entire track. So I kinda come up here to audio mixer, and we are looking for audio track one which is this one here, audio one, and we can adjust the volume up and down using this little slider here. So if we wanna lower the volume we can. If we want to increase it, then we wanna go above here as well. In order to set your
volume levels correct here, you want to be playing your video back, and you're looking at the audio bars. So we can see here the
audio here is pretty good. It's from yellow into green,
but it's not too loud, it's not going into the orange or red. You can see if we boost this up, right now we're up in the red. Now you don't wanna be in the red. It means it's too loud, It's distorting. It's going to sound bad. So you wanna make adjustments
here using this slider until you're at this point,
which is just before the red. Then once you've got your
primary audio sorted, we wanna go ahead and unmute our, say music track in this case, and we are going to adjust
the volume levels on that. Now this one is going to
again be a creative thing. It's personal preference, how
loud or quiet this should be, but what we generally find is anywhere between negative 20 and negative 35 depending
on the music track is around where we'll
sit for background music for our videos. Now you do have the
ability in HitFilm as well to adjust your volume levels throughout say the music track here. So if we click on our music track, we can hold down control or command, and you can see we get our
cursor change to a plus. Now if we click on that white line, that's gonna add what's
called a key frame. So we can have our volume
level at this point running along until this point,
until it hits our key frame. Let's say we wanna make it
a little bit louder now, we can add in another key frame, again holding down command or control, and then we can adjust this white line, and you can see our
audio is now increasing to our new volume level at that point. Now let's say we wanted
to bring it back down. We can come across to about here where we want it to lower
back down at a key frame, again holding command or control, and another key frame, and we can grab this
white line, pull it down. So our audio is starting at this level, it is increasing and staying
at this level for this point, then decreasing and then
staying at this level for the remainder of our video. So you wanna go ahead now, adjust all of your volume levels, again, either on a clip by clip basis, or on an entire track, or you can be using these key
frames to really dial it in. And I strongly recommend here that you aren't using headphones for this so you can really hear what
this is going to sound like. Once that's done, we're going to look at color grading or tweaking the colors in our videos. So we wanna make sure we've got our first clip selected here. We then wanna come back
across to our effects tab. Let's minimize this one, let's scroll up here, and you can see we've got color grading and color correcting in here. And there's a ton of effects in here all to help you really dial in the look and feel of your video. You can see again, we've got quite a few in here that are on the upgraded plans only, but there's still quite a
lot in here for free as well. So the first one I wanna add
on is the color temperature. So click and drag that on, and this will let us tweak if our shot is looking warmer or cooler based on moving this slider here. So let's go around there somewhere. Let's then add in our hue,
saturation and lightness. Let's come over here to master, and we can adjust in here the brightness and darkness of our shot. So if it's too dark,
we can brighten it up. If it's too bright, we can darken it down. Now, again, there's so many
other tools in here as well to really be able to dial this in, but this is a quick way that
you can tweak the colors. Depending on how you've shot this, if you need to adjust the colors, you can use this top slider here to actually shift the colors. And if you're wanna boost the colors, then we can use saturation
here to add more color. You don't wanna go too crazy with this, or take some of the color out. And this is how you can
get a black and white look. So let's just increase this a little bit. So you can see just how easy it is just from adding a few of these filters. Now with some of the
more professional ones like this one here, color adjustment, which if we add on, we can see that we have
added the watermark on here. You can see how much
more control you can have with some of these tools. I'm gonna go ahead and remove that, right click and remove. You can see our watermark is gone. Let's say we're happy with
the look that we've created for this first clip and we wanna apply them
to the rest of our clips, we can select that clip, come up the top to edit, choose copy. We can then select by drawing out a box all our remaining clips, and we can choose edit, paste attributes, and then in here we get to
choose what we want to paste or apply from our first clip. So let's turn off the audio properties. Let's turn off video scale. The only ones we wanna apply now are the two color adjustments here. So when we paste those on, those are now applied to
all of our remaining clips. So you wanna go ahead now and make any adjustments to the colors on both your primary footage
and your Broll clips as well. Once you're done with that, it's time to export your video. Now we can either export everything in this entire timeline here, or we can mark out an area. Now I do recommend that
you mark out an area so that you're not
exporting any extra clips that you might have left in your timeline. So we wanna come right
to the start of our clip, press I on the keyboard
to mark an in point, go to our very last clip or where we want our export to finish and press O on the keyboard. So you can see now our blue area, our working area is just
confined to that space. Now we wanna come over here
to this little export button and we want to choose add to queue so that we can tweak
and adjust our settings. And we want to add to the
queue our in-to-out area. So this area that we marked out. And then we have that export that's queued up here ready for us to go. So we can adjust where we
want this to save out to by selecting on here. I'm just gonna leave that
in its default location which is on my desktop. I can also adjust the presets. So you can see here it's
defaulting to YouTube 1080p HD which is where I'm going to leave it, but you can see there's
lots of other presets in here as well. Now do note if you are
using the free version, if you do export a 2160p or a 4K video, then that will have a watermark. So that is a limitation on the free one in that you are able
to export up to 1080p. So 1080p is gonna be fine. When we wanna start our export, we just want to hit up
here, start exporting. It's gonna give us a warning here, again, if you're on the free one, that you may have a watermark if you have used any of
those filters or effects or anything that are only
available on the paid plan. So we can hit continue because
we haven't used any of those, and our export is starting. And it will give you
a quick little preview in here when it is rendering out. And this is a great little place again to check that everything is
the way that you want it. Once your video is finished exporting, it's a good idea to play
it back on your computer, but also on a mobile device to make sure that everything looks and sounds
the way that you want it, and then your video is ready to release. So that's a complete tutorial
of HitFilm for beginners. Now the actual process, step by step that I just took you through is our primal video method. The fastest way to edit your videos down with minimal wasted time and rework. You can download your
free copy of that guide that will work with HitFilm, but also any other video
editing app or software to help you streamline
your video creation. There is a link on screen
to grab your free download, and I will see you in the next video.
