Hitfilm Express 12 Tutorial - Designed for Beginners

alright there Jamie Keith here today a teachers tech hope you're having a great day today today I'm going to give a tutorial on hitfilm express 12 so this video editor is free to use I think it's one of the better ones out there this is free no watermarks on it can be used in Windows or your Mac if you're looking for the specs I'll put the link down to this page that I'm on here you can check out the specs just by clicking here what you need on your computer there's a little bit of a process when you go and hit download they'll ask you to share it through social media but then you'll get the email link and then you're good to download it and start making some great videos so in this this is a beginners tutorial that I'm doing here today but I want to get through kind of the layout of it importing your media organizing your media doing basic editing with hip film Xpress 12 using special effects and transitions and titles and even getting then to the exporting if you want to put it to youtube or maybe you just want to download it on your computer so let's get started here today everything I do is time mark down below so you can just kind of jump around to different parts or if you come back later you can just click what you need to go so check out the description down below for the links and the timestamps let's get started here today on hitfilm express 12 so I'm just gonna go ahead and open up hitfilm express you can see I have the icon right on my desktop I'm using Windows 10 for today's tutorial this is the folder that I'll be working out of I have some videos some images and also some audio in here so I'm just gonna go ahead open this up when you open hit film Express you're gonna be greeted with a lot of links to different videos for examples lots of great examples that you can apply as you're learning more and more as I said this is more of a beginners tutorial I'll create more videos dealing with specifics about hitfilm express 212 but for today just to get you started so when we go ahead and start a new project you can see in the top left-hand corner here there's the new if I was working on a previous project I can go ahead and hit open here I also have under the menu I can do the same thing here by creating new or opening so I'm just gonna go ahead and hit new and I get the new project settings so this is where you can adjust depending on what project settings you want you can just go through and pick if you wanted to do an Instagram video or maybe you wanted 720p on this you can go ahead you can see as I change this the width and the height with the pixels changed on this if you ever want to go just back to the original defaults if you can't remember what that was just hit restore defaults and you also have your audio sample rate that you can choose I'm just leaving it all the same and I'm gonna go ahead and hit OK once you hit OK what you're gonna be greeted with with all the panels inside hitfilm express twelve now I'm just gonna import some media right away into the media panel so I can kind of show you all the different things with the layouts here now down in the left hand corner this is where I'm going to import my media this is the media panel and to do this you can see I have an import right here there's a few different ways you can import your media into this so if I hit import now this already brings me to the folder that I showed you that I'd already opened previously and that has my footage that I want in it so I can click on one of these and I can bring it in and hit open and as soon as I do this the media clip down here is in the trimmer up here so I could preview it just here in the trimmer so this I haven't put anything into my editing yet but this allows me to preview it here now in if you just wanted to double click in here it also will open up different different clips you can see I have various things from images here I can select different ones I can select multiple ones and put it in like so this is an image this one here and as I scroll down you can see the audio is here another way you can do it if I just go ahead and open up a window here let's say we have this open I can just go ahead and drag in if I wanted this one I could drag things right into here also so there's many different ways that you can import your media in they'll all do the same thing once you bring it in you can see you can do a ListView here so if you want it just to see the names on this one and the icon to kind of quickly to show you can see this is audio and this one is an image with the videos beside it also you can also kind of organize things a little bit better in the media panel here by creating new folder so if I was going to click new folder I can name this so if I was just calling this video and then what I can do is drag my video inside these so I could go ahead and create one for images I could create one for audio and this way I could just be a little bit more organized when I bring things in at any time if you want to see the D on each of the media assets if you want to just see the settings on those the properties if I go ahead and click on it on this little gear right here you can see it will show me my frame rate of that particular one and what you'll notice is that the frame rate of certain ones that these videos might not match my project settings but when I drag it over you can choose to make sure that they're the same on it so if you want to check the properties just remember this little gear that you can go through inch each one so now that we've brought our I brought everything in are the media that we're gonna use let's go ahead and just start some editing here so now I brought in my media and I brought I created other folders you can see I have my audio image and videos and I brought all the other videos and I've organized everything just so it's a little easier to work with and fine you can have that choice of your thumbnail image I'm gonna keep it to my ListView just so I can see more here but the other thing I just wanted to mention too before you now you have your footage imported maybe do a save so it's always good to do have it save so the first time you could do a save as or it'll do a save as if it is your first time and then you can just I'll just call this tutorial I'm gonna save it on my desktop like so and then it can just save as I go on because if it crashed I want to make sure that I have my maybe hours of work backed up there so what I'm gonna do now is just some other adjustments if you wanted to preview now I've showed you how when you click on these different ones that will show in the trimmer up here you can change the size around here by just going through when you get your handles when you get that and then you drag if you wanted to see something in a different size you can go through and make the adjustments so if I wanted my editor timeline down here so I just drag to see where wherever I get that handle and I drag it up then I could have more my tracks here so same thing with my media panel over here if I wanted to see more of that or if I wanted to see more of my editor it's there now I'm gonna be dragging footage into the editor timeline there are two different types of timeline in hitfilm we have our editor timeline and our composite timeline the composite is kind of working in a multiple layer clip where you can add effects and everything I won't be diving into the into the composite a lot but I'll be talking more about just this editor timeline in this beginners one here where we're gonna be working with the different tracks and bringing them over into this spot to do our editing so now that we have our footage we have it organized we've saved our prod let's go ahead and bring some footage into our editor timeline now the first way I'm going to show you how to do this is if I go up to I'm going to just go to this one with the puppy playing on the beach let's say if I'm watching it in the trimmer' window here what I can do is I can watch it up here if I get to a certain point where I'm like this is where I want to start my clip when I bring it into my editor so do some editing even prior what I can do is use this in marker in point here so I make an employee notice how this disappeared behind it and I could watch it for a little bit more and I get to a certain part and then I can let's say I'll pause it and I do an out point now it's just this part that I've marked in so at this point I can add it to my add it to insert my clip to my editor timeline one thing to know it's my play heads over here if I hit insert and right now I was going to say oh do you want to match your your framerate and everything just like I mentioned before that these clips might be different I'm just gonna say yes on this one notice that my playhead was right here and that's where it was inserted so if I was bringing it my playhead was over here I can also just drag it down from here so I drag it down I could put it anywhere I want but if I put it through here notice my playhead get burped got inserted was raped by my playhead now I just brought in three instances of it the original file was never changed if I show you the original file I'll just drag it over so another way you can bring to my timeline is just to drag things over this was the original footage right here you can see how much longer it is so I'm going to just go ahead I could drag my playhead over one of these clips and you can see this is the shortened clip right here that I did my editing on if you want to delete any of these one so of course I wouldn't want all these ones I just brought in this is the selection tool here and as I select it for once you can see how they're highlighted at this point I could hit delete my if I selected hit delete it go way I can select also multiple if I just drag and select everything like this I can move them all around at once or I could hit delete and they're all gone too so that's just your first steps of bringing things over to the timeline so I'm gonna bring back to actually the full length of this one bring it into my video one timeline here so I'm just bringing it right to this right to this start here so the one thing I just want to talk about our layers in kind of the sequence so if you're bringing things over to your timeline you're just gonna sink once in them in the order that you want so if I was bringing this one over here this down below says that there's audio I know there's no audio on this one so if I go ahead and play this they play you play them in order that I'm just gonna move ahead so it doesn't play the whole thing it will switch as I watch my playhead go across it moves it over here like so now if I was gonna I'm gonna delete this one again here if I'm gonna put something in the above track and analyze so what's gonna happen it's only going to show the above track so if I take this one right here the waves and I drag it and I'm just gonna drag it above and notice what happened he created a video too so with the video too if I play it now if you're new to video editing this is an important thing to know with this program in most programs the bottom layer if you put something on top of it it won't be seen so do note if you're maybe you're doing that on purpose but if you're not seeing a certain one that you want maybe you have the layers covering up so now I can put in a different track like this and go ahead and play it and it will switch over but do note that when you play it like this that you're only gonna see the top layer if you put them on top of each other so let's do some basic editing now with with hitfilm express so I'm just gonna bring back some video again some of the clips that you've already saw I'm gonna bring this one back over into video one and I'm gonna just say yes you can match it I'm gonna drag my playhead back and then if I hit play notice it's the loud sound maybe I don't want the waves and everything when I'm working on this if it's a bit of a distraction when I brought this video and you can see that the audio is underneath if I go ahead and just click on this just like so and now I hit play again I didn't delete the audio but I muted it so I could be working on it if I didn't want to hear the audio all the time I could just go ahead and hit mute I could unmute it and it's playing again so in this one if I didn't want to see a video so I'm gonna leave this as mute here maybe I bring in another video and I'll put this up on this track if I was playing it maybe I don't want to see this video to this one all I have to do is click the eye here and now actually I'll turn the audio back on if I hit play you can see the audio still there and then if I it would keep playing and showing this one because I have this video track I've turned off it so you can't view it so if I bring this one down into here notice it doesn't preview in it here but this track is fine because I still have the eye turned on so you can just click on a few of these here when your depending if you want to see something or hear something remember those two options to quickly turn it off so I'm gonna zoom up a little bit what the one thing that at the very bottom you can see there's this zoom tool so what this does is allows me to zoom up on a clip so you can see kind of zooms up here put a broom right playhead over and this just allows me to get maybe if there's some cutting I want to do about a certain point allows me to kind of go frame right for him a little bit easier and to kind of see just it more close-up now this audio is bothering me I don't even want this audio in here if I try to click on it and move it and notice it it's all linked together but what I can do in hitfilm express is actually just right click on it and you can see there's an unlink here so if I go ahead and hit the link now if I just click off it then click back on it notice I can actually move this around so I could take this and actually just go ahead and delete the audio so I now if I go ahead and play it I have no more audio in it so if you do want to remove the audio just unlink it then delete it like so so now I've did some a little bit of editing took away the took away the audio on this one you can also do some quick trims on this too so if I go ahead and click on this I make sure you have it selected so if I have this selected notice when I go to the ends and I'll go to both ends here I get two handles like so what this allows me to do I can quickly hold and then drag in and and I trimmed it so just like kind of up where I used the trimmer before it's and do my in and outs I can trim from the ends and do it that way so if I drag it back it's not it puts it back like so but I can't make it longer if I go past the point and I can only make it as long as it ever was so that's just some quick trims if you know you want to trim the ends just quickly drag it from each end now the other thing is when you're doing trims and everything you might want to just undo your previous steps take a look at the history over here notice I can go back and just click on the back steps and it puts it back so don't be worried if you've got you know worked on something for a bit and you've made a mistake I just go back using the history over here so I'm just going to go back to my media here and now the next thing I want to show you is let's say if you want to cut something in the middle what you can do is use this tool right here so this is the slice tool so if I go ahead and click the slice tool and I want to get rid so I can play this for a bit maybe I want to stop it right there and I'm just gonna slice it now it didn't delete anything it just sliced it and I can go ahead and hit play you can kind of see that there's a line there I could go back to my move tool and take this piece out move it to the different layer move it to the front like so alright so I can put it right back to there if I hit play since its side by side there's no gap it'll just look like normal but the other thing I can do if there's something I want to slice I would in the middle what I can do is use my slice tool again I'll bring it to a spot slice this and now you have my selection tool select it and hit delete so now I've taken out something in the middle now at this point there's this gap in here if I was playing it will just play black when I get to it this might be where you want to join your Eclipse like so so those are some basic trimming techniques for editing inside the timeline editor here you can use just drag from the ends or use your razor tool and also what I've showed you before using the trimmer window to do your ins and outs to get the specific footage that you want a couple of the other tools that I just want to bring attention to inside the timeline editor would be the snap tool so down below here is right now it's on blue so it's turned on so what does its snap tool allows you to do if I drag close to it it'll just snap to the edge the other one so it makes it easy to kind of fill that gap in between them if you bring things over top so if I keep dragging it it actually cuts the other video so it's I took these of the wave and put it over top of the puppy now if I drag it away notice that it's trimmed it so do be aware if you overlap them like that it will do cut like that if I turn off the snap tool you can see now it just slides easily it doesn't snap into place so the snap tool is nice because it allow you allows you just to kind of connect it to the end quite quickly I'll just go back a few steps here with some control Z what I want to show you now is just this tool here is the ripple tool so what this will allow you to do is now I've showed you just dragging the ends before and it left kind of a gap when you trimmed it so what this allows you to do if I grab this when I drag it back I'm trimming this one it just fills in the gap right away so versus this one when I just grabbed the ends and I drag it notice the gap stays so those are just a couple tools for beginners that can you know just speed up your editing for you but do play around with some of the other tools you'll see how you use them just by clicking on them and dragging over and you'll give you that extra information maybe you want to change the speed of something so in this case if I go to I'm gonna go to my intro and I'm gonna bring my intro over here and I'm gonna match it again so I know my intro in it's full it's very slow it's about 10 seconds I never play it like that and I want to speed this up so what you do is you right-click on it and then you can see all these different options that you want but I want to go to set speed and duration when I click on that so what's the speed I want well this is where you can adjust it and you can see the duration is changing as I decrease so if I wanted to go faster I need to go above a hundred percent if I wanted to go slower I move it down below so I want in this case I want it to go above a hundred percent so let's say if I put in 150 and you can see how it shortened it like so but if that wasn't quite enough if I wanted to go maybe I'll go to two hundred percent and maybe at four seconds so at this point if I hit play again it's a little bit faster now I could keep adjusting those settings depending on how I want it to now another thing you can do to make some settings so if I go to this footage right here I'm gonna drag this one over with a couple of walking on the beach and just kind of show you notice what's happening here as a play it this is zoomed out and this one zoomed in this is a little bit different so maybe I want this one wanted to be in the original format you can see if I go over here and click the properties and I can check the properties and if any of these by click on it notice that the that the size of this one is a lot larger at 4096 by 2160 so maybe I want this to fit in my 19 by 20 by 1080p what I can do is right-click on this one and now at this one I can go transform and fit to frame so what it does now it will match it to this one like so and then as they play it it plays it back like so so those are just some options to make some adjustments to this I could keep changing the size of this to when when any of these if you want them smaller you can drag this like so then notice how are you gonna be careful when you drag the corners when you're sizing because notice if I make it square its distorting this so if I go back to my history and and undo a few things again what I can do if I hold my shift key as I shrink it it stays in the proportions quickly Laurie I don't have to worry about skewing it like that and I can move this around the screen and you might wonder why you'd want to do something like this well what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna make this a little bit smaller so we can see it I could grab the corner here again and bring it in now I'm gonna bring this up one layer and what I'm gonna do now is in this kind of go so I'm going to go back to another media if I go back to this one right here with a puppy and I bring the puppy underneath notice now what I have here is I have kind of a picture in a picture so I can actually see the bottom layer even though this is on top I'm scared this down so I can select on it I can move it around more I could put in a different size but if you wanted to do is kind of that picture-in-picture effect that's how you could do it is just create that and make it a little bit smaller like so I just want to bring in an image and some audio now to show you how to quickly add those now I'm gonna go to my image folder and I just have one that I'm gonna bring in here and I'm gonna drag it over and you can see this is just a picture and right away it doesn't fit as larger so I can quickly make those adjustments in the transform to fit to screen now on this one what I want to do now so with an image I can stretch out an image for as long as I want it so if I wanted to play for two seconds 10 seconds 20 seconds you just stretch it for as long or as short as you want it and you can put it in any of these video tracks just like any of the video now the next thing I'm gonna bring in is my audio so if I have my audio down here and I have a couple of examples so maybe I bring in this wicked surf one and I bring it and it's gonna start right here so I line it up and then if I go ahead and play it now maybe that's too loud so you can quickly make the adjustments on it by just grabbing this line right here so if I wanted it quieter bringing it down and you can see on the control on the side that it's on the meters it's a lot less right now so depending on how you want to do this now with this audio you can also cut it with the razor tool like we've done before with the video you can slice and take parts out of it you can do your trimming from the end it works very similar to the video and you can have multiple audio tracks that you can have many many playing at once another thing you can do with your audio is to add some effects to it if you wanted to fade in fade out so if I bring this one up a bit and if I go over to my effects over here you can see that there's transitions audios so if I want to maybe fade this one out I can drag it over and if I have play now you can see how it just kind of faded out and at the end now I can what I can do is if i zoom up on this so you can see a little bit better on this on this fate or another tool I was gonna show you to this hand is when you're working with your footage and especially as it gets longer the drag tool is a handy one because I can just drag it over to get to the exact spot that I want and this is the transition that I just added in if you wanted to make any adjustments to this if I wanted to delete it I could just hit delete on it or if I wanted it longer I could go to the edge like this and drag it so then that fade-out becomes longer on it so that's how you can add some audio do some quick trimming just like the video and then adding those transitions to it too so let's move back over to the video now and we're gonna add some transitions to those so I'm gonna zoom out here so we can see more of this again and I'm gonna shorten the picture because I don't need the picture this long so I'm gonna just shorten it down let's say day here so now I'm gonna add video back again so I'm gonna go back to my media and this time we'll just go back to my media my video folder and i'm gonna choose well I'll choose the puppy again and I'll put it on the beach and we can do a transition between picture to video or to video to video so I'm gonna add another video just right after it here oops I did one yeah this one will work and so if I go over to the effects again you can see that the CIA transitions audio if I look underneath that I have transition videos so I could take these here I could open them up and they have different dissolves on these ones or different motions but I'll just use a cross dissolve and I'm gonna drag it over between these two right here so if I hit play on this and you can see now beat when it goes and switches between the two I have that cross dissolve now again I could zoom up on that you can see here is here it is if I wanted to longer cross-dissolve I can move it like this and move it back and hit play and that cross dissolves just it's a little slower as it moves between the two of them so it's that's how you add the transitions and remember or what I said you could do this in between your images too so if I go back to my effects over here and take this cross dissolve I can add it between an image and a picture too just like that so very easy to add to your audio and to your video the transitions so next let's add a little text when adding text look up in the viewer you can see that the a will be here so when you select that go ahead and click on the frame that you want to add it to or on to the layer it's gonna create a new layer where it's gonna add the text and I'm just gonna type I'll say beach vacation like so and at this time I could go and move it around and place it anywhere I want you can see down here created this new layer I can also move this to wherever I want if I move the playhead wherever that go is well it's a beach vacation now if I want to make adjustments to the text just go over down to the meat of your panel and when you just kind of scroll through you can find text and this is where you can start to change if you wanted a different if you wanted a different font maybe you wanted a different size let's just quickly make it larger here let's put this to 100 or a little bit over 100 and you can see as they go through I can make other adjustments to things like the color and so on so you can get it to just where you would like just by setting up whether you want it how you want it aligned but remember you can move this to wherever you would like on this and also when it's on this layer you can move this wherever you would like to so that's just a way to insert some text inside hitfilm express before we get into our exporting and finishing up our project today let's do a little adding some special effects so I'm gonna go over to the effects tab in the path and I'm gonna go to first I'm gonna go to this one this particle particles and simulation here and I'm gonna add some lightning and electricity to this so I'm gonna drag this and I'm doing this in a simple way you could get more into effects with a composite shot but for beginners video I think this is a perfect way to kind of just start with this so if we're gonna drag this over and I'm gonna drag it to this Beach one and just drop it right on top you can see now if I hit play there's a little bit of lightning that's on top of this or it's inside the the clip here I can do some adjustments to this now so if I go over to this and open this up I can change the amount of seed so if I want to live more for trunks and I could go ahead and hit play again you can see how it's adapting I can also move it so if I take this you can see that I can stretch this out I can move it around and place it in different spots depending on how small or how large I would like it because you could have it start at a certain side size in the video clip and have it grow through it you can see with the start and end of this so I'm not going to go through all these options you can go through and take a look and play with different ones but that's how quickly you can add some special effects so take a look at all the effects that you can add in here just by under this effects tab here I'm gonna add one more effects and that's gonna be the green screen here and I'm gonna use the same clip on the beach I don't have anything on this one I'm gonna go back this time to my media and I'm gonna go grab a I have a green screen media one here I just gotta remembered there it is so I'm gonna drag this one to the top layer so when you're working with green screen you need to drag it to the top layer and then your bottom layer is gonna be the background now what I'm gonna do so if you notice I have this explosion here on this so I'm gonna just drag down the volume because it's a little bit loud and so I'm gonna drag it and you can see it's a green screen explosion I'm gonna get rid of the green so I'm going to add another effect to this so this time when I'm under the effects what you're going to go to is so you go to your keying and go down to your hue and RGB key just drag this over top of it now right away you notice it went see-through on the explosion that's not what I want I need to adjust it to make the green go away but all I have to do is open this up and see this where it says color just click on I'm sorry click OK there click on the eyedropper click and hold and bring this over and then let go and then the green disappears and so if I hit play now I have this explosion I can go back I can adjust this so maybe I want the tolerance to be so if it wasn't quite right or maybe I want less tolerance on it I can make an adjustment you can see how some green comes in you make the adjustments to make what works best for you you can also go and transform this remember too so if I wanted to scale this make sure if I'm on this layer if I move this around you can see I can grab the edges like I showed you before I could shrink down this explosion or I could make it larger and place it to where I want so that's important to understand with layers and green-screen what you want as your background versus what you add the green on top of it and how to and hit them express how to get rid of this so you can see we have an explosion on the beach using green-screen I just downloaded this clip from a free website and you can do a lot of searching online to get some royalty free ones to play around with so now that we've kind of gone over the basics of hip film expressed well let's get to the exporting and finishing this off so we can either send it to YouTube or download it on to your computer so let's say you're all done your project you want to make sure you can export it correctly because right now it's just a hit film Express project so you got to make sure you export it and save it as whether you do rate settings whether you go to YouTube or depending on the setting you want so what you need to do is go over to here where it says export and click on export now there's in and out areas if you didn't want to do the whole thing but I'm going to do the contents this time right here and I'm going to go to contents of it and go to export because I'm done working at this point now you can see right here if I wanted to do it in an out point if I knew the times I could select the times and put them in here so maybe I wanted it from 3 minutes to 4 minutes and 22 seconds I could put that in and get a certain part of that video to export but for my purposes I would want I want to export the whole thing and now what I do is once it's already here it goes down into the queue getting ready for to start exporting you can choose where you want to save it and you can choose your format so you can see I'm under YouTube's 28 1080p HD I can make changes here's the presets that are already there I can make a new preset if I want but for me these presets work well my stuff goes to youtube so this is what I would watch here if I want to make sure I know where I'm saving the file to you just select this right through here and you could pick a different path so I could have it in a different folder and then it would so I know when I'm uploading to YouTube I know exactly where I've saved it and then I can upload it to my youtube channel so I'm just gonna save it here now I haven't started exporting yet once I have all the settings that I want what I need to do is go down to the very bottom where you can see where it says start exporting so if I go ahead and hit start exporting it will give me a start time and then the elapsed time so right now it's running through the projects that the film that I just did that I did through this tutorial today and it's exporting it out so it'd be all ready for me to go to YouTube and upload it or watch it as an mp4 file so I hope this tutorial today on hitfilm express has kind of got you understanding how it works let me know if there's other specifics about hitfilm you'd want to learn about I want to go in more details about the composite layers and everything - on that type of timeline but let me know in the comments down below thanks for watching this week and I'll see you next time on teachers tech

Channel: Teacher's Tech

Views: 163,963

Keywords: hitfilm expess 12, hitfilm express, video editing, free video editor, teachers tech, best free video editor, video editing tutorial, hitfilm 4 express, hitfilm express editing, hitfilm express effects, hitfilm express text, hitfilm express 2019, how to use hitfilm express 12, learn hitfilm express 12, hitfilm 12, hitfilm12 express, hitfilm express tutorial, hitfilm express 2019 beginners guide, hitfilm express 12 beginners guide

Id: AcanZUMYup0

Length: 35min 52sec (2152 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 20 2019