Hitfilm Express 2018: Basic Editing Tutorial

good afternoon everybody my name is iridium Axel and welcome back to another video tutorial today I'm going to be going over how to use the basic functions of hitfilm express in 2018 so that's the version that we're working with here and so let's get started the first thing you're going to need to do is go to FX home comm slash Express come over here get hitfilm express free right here you're gonna have to make an account and then hit send me the Express downloads I'll send you an email with the link to download this software and then we can get started all right so now here we are in the software after I've downloaded it and set everything up although I already had it installed I'll admit but when you're going through the installation I would like to tell you to hit the download all features button because it is more hard drive space on your computer that'll it'll take up but it's also all of the features so even though there are some that you might not ever use I prefer not to take that risk so right here on the home screen when you start it up you can see a whole bunch of different tutorials for how to do things in hit films there's also a user guide right here and add-on packs for the free version of hit film which is Express if there's any specific features that you need that you don't have yet and most of these are between like 5 and 20 dollars but I would personally prefer to just get the pro version if I was getting that serious about it but whatever it's your choice so now we're going to get into creating a project so we're gonna hit new and we have to select our template right here they have plenty of different ones to choose from but we're gonna go for 1080p full HD 60fps because that's most of the video that I work with then the rest of these settings are perfectly fine and we can come down here and hit start compositing or start editing we're gonna be working with editing for this video because most of you guys are probably going to be doing a lot of basic stuff and that's where editing focuses compositing you're looking more at like video effects and stuff so let's just hit start editing alright so here we are in the editor workspace as you can see it's kind of some complex stuff if you've never really worked with an editor like this before so we'll go over each of these sections individually and what they do if yours doesn't look exactly like this all you have to do is come up to these boxes up here and hit editing and then that will set them all just like I have them for right now and you can of course modify this stuff later all of these things are boxes that can be dragged around into different positions so you can have fun customizing your workspace for what you think is best but what we're going to focus on first is the media tab over here before we begin with using the media panel we have to go over the reason for the media panel so pretty much any media that you use which means pictures audio video will be going in here before going into your video into the timeline whatever you can't just plop it straight out of a folder into the timeline and the reason for this is because it'll keep it a lot more organized this way when you have your Media Center right here that you can just pull things from and put things into at a moment's notice and it keeps it all grouped together in one place for you to use with that being said let's go ahead and show you some of the stuff that you can do to use the media tab so the first thing is of course you can drag videos from folders straight to here so I'll drag it from here to here and this is a the Legend of Zelda breath of the wild clip that I have as you can see it shows up in here now but I don't necessarily just want it floating there all on its own that's kind of unorganized especially when I start flopping and a ton of other videos and audios and pictures in here so what I'm gonna do is create a new folder by just clicking this button and name it Zelda now I can just drag that file into that folder and now it's sort of in there with any other Zelda files I might want to get now I also know that maybe for this video I want to have some minecraft clips so I'll just type minecraft into this other folder and alternatively you can right-click hover over new and create a folder that way which I'm going to do because I also have some images that I might want to use so let's look at any minecraft videos that I might want to slap in here hi I like this one right here so I'll put that directly into the folder I have a few others I'll put this one directly into the folder and also put this one directly into the folder I think that'll be good enough for now so I can just close this now that's all of my minecraft files I want to slap in but there's also some images that I want so I'll open these select all of these and just plop them into the images folder that way they'll all be ready for me to use throughout the video something else to note is if you don't feel like dragging the files in directly from a folder you can just hit the import button right here and navigate to the file directly if you feel like you have to alright so the next thing we're going to go over is the tremor and you can hop around from video to video to use in the trimmer by just going into your media panel and selecting it like that so we're gonna be working with our zelda video here and the way the tremor works is you basically set an in and out point so that if you want to just grab a certain part of your video you can it's not very hard so I think what I want for this zelda video is to zoom in too right when I go in the cave so about here I'm going to set an endpoint and you can do that by just hitting I so that's what I'm gonna do or you can hit this button over here and then I want to find where I leave the cave which is around here so I'm just gonna hit o and now all I need to do is drag this into my timeline which we'll go over in a and I have the trim down version of that Zelda clip I can also do this with some of my minecraft clips so I'll just click on this one right here I'll go right here set an end point and just a little bit further set an out point and drag this right on the end cool right another noteworthy thing about the trimmer is you have these two buttons here insert clip and overlay clips and these also have hotkeys for them a lot of things in video editors have hotkeys because that way you can navigate through any controls you may need very easily so one of these is insert clip where it will push the video that you're hovered on out of the way in either direction to insert your clip I'm just going to ctrl Z that to get it out of here and they also have overlay clip where it will delete the section of the clip your hovered on to go ahead and slap that video right in the next thing we're going to go over is the editor timeline which is one of the most important things in this entire program so you had better pay attention so the first thing that you can notice when you look at this is this is where your video and audio and images and whatever this is where they go so it shows from start to finish what your video is going to look like where you can zip around to to look at different parts of the video and how you can apply effects and such this is your primary workspace but before we begin actually working in this workspace I want to make it lag a little less because for some reason hitfilm has a problem with displaying these nice crispy thumbnails here so what I like to do is come down here to this little arrow hover over video size hits small and then for audio size hit medium because that way it still shows the audio waveforms as you can see there but it's a lot smaller it takes up less space and since there's no thumbnails for the video it actually makes hitfilm lag lot less and I'm not quite sure why that is it might just be on my computer but I find you don't really need those thumbnails to be able to tell what's going on sometimes it might be helpful but if that's the case you can just turn it on for a second to see where everything is and then turn it back off also with them being so small you can fit a lot of different tracks so what do I mean by tracks basically you have the starting one video and one audio track so you can have your videos going one after another I can slap this one in here right after that cut down video that I had and I can slap this one in there immediately afterwards if I want to and as you can see it instantly zoomed out so that I could see more of the screen and that just gives us a linear timeline clip to clip to clip to clip but let's say you wanted to overlay something maybe you wanted to overlay music onto the pre-existing audio well conveniently I have a music file here and it's an MD K song that I got for free completely legally and if you just drag that below it'll create a second audio track but if you want to create that audio track ahead of time you can just right click under this double bar right here so you're in the audio area hit insert track and enter if you want to keep it as named audio 3 or you could have just renamed it right there to 3rd audio track for example and you can do the same thing of course with video I'll just create two more for us to work with so now you have a lot more stuff to work with you can overlay multiple sound effects if you want you can overlay this music like we're doing here and you can do whatever but for music a lot of times it's pretty loud especially when you put it into a timeline because it plays it at the actual loudness that the song is made so if you want to hear my voice you're going to have to turn it down so as you can hear that's pretty loud so I can just grab this bar right here which controls the gain and mess around with it and play it until I find that it's quiet enough for me I think that's a good audio level so you can just play around with it that way if you really want to and you can do the same thing with all of these different clips up here you can play around with this one and just control Z to get it back if you mess something up you can make it you can mess around with each one individually if you so wish all right so now that we've added in our lovely music right here let's say I also want to add an image thankfully I have some images to add so I'm going to slap this one from my images folder right here by dragging and clicking I'm gonna put it in the video to track right above my video right about here because that's where I want it for whatever reason and as you can see it's a little bit smaller than my whole screen because I'm using a 1080p video and a 720p image and I don't necessarily need to have it that's mom but I also want a little bit of my screen left and so what you can do is just grab one of the corners here and move it around like that but I don't want to move it around like that that's going to mess with the aspect ratio and it's gonna be kind of weird so I'm gonna go ahead control Z it and I'm also going to hold shift and pull out like that which keeps it at a consistent aspect ratio as you stretch it also I want to move it a little bit to the left and up so I'm gonna grab this red arrow right here move it to the left green arrow right here move it up so now I have this image right where I wanted for some reason I wanted right there or maybe I don't want it right there let's say I want it a lot smaller and I want it in the corner of my video so you can see it right in the corner as you're still watching the video everything makes nice plentiful sense all right so now I've that image but I've noticed oh no the beginning of my video has no fade in and it definitely needs a fade in because you don't want to just BAM here's a video people so I'm gonna go over to this tab over here the effects tab and as you may imagine there's a whole bunch of different effects you can use here and I recommend you play around with them and see the ones that you like and the ones you want to mess with but what I want to do is search in the effects tab so I'm going to search for fade and I'm gonna go for fade to color because that's the one for video these ones are for audio so I'm gonna slap my fade to color right here on the very beginning and I can hold ctrl and scroll in to get closer or I can go down to this bar right here and scroll in to get closer or further away but since I've scrolled in I can grab onto the edge of this fade and make it a bit longer so now since we when we play the video it has a nice gradual fade although you don't want to use this fade for everything because if you do use this fade for everything you'll end up with some weird video effects since it starts from an absolute black and moves into the color rather than starting from being completely clear and moving to color there's a difference there because if we went to put a fade like that on top of our image so I'll just get right here to the image and we put the fade onto the image like this and say I want to shorten it down because I don't want to take want it to take up an entire half and we're playing a video wish but it fades in from black into the actual image and let's watch that again because I know it was probably pretty fast you so wish but yeah as you can see it appeared black and then it faded in but you don't usually want that for something that's overlaid on a video so how do you do something else a different fade that'll be better to have it come from clear in tewevision well we're going to come up to controls up here so that's the second tab with the one right next to media we're going to go to transform and then we're going to go to Oh Cassity and this is getting a little more complex so pay attention we're going to scroll in a little bit just to see what we're working with a little bit more we can see this clip or this image is on screen for what looks like about if you wish but there's a cool-down on the rod so what maybe like 4 seconds something like that it's not very long at all so we're going to start from the beginning make sure that this image is selected we're going to start from the very beginning and we're going to go over to this opacity thing and click the button right there and that means that it has set a keyframe at the very beginning or wherever we have selected on there so what we want to do is before even moving and scrubbing through the timeline we're going to take the opacity all the way down so that means it's completely clear then we're going to move in a little bit so we don't want it to be a full second that we move in so let's just make it 42 seconds zero zero milliseconds so we move into there and from there we want it to move into the full opacity and then here we're going to come to the end and sort of find our way a little bit back it doesn't have to be exact of course because who's going to look down at the exact frame where it happens so we're gonna come right here and you need to set another keyframe now you can't see these keyframes but they're there they're pretty much markers for what the state of the video is at that specific point so once we come right here all we need to do is drag it down and back up and that'll set a new keyframe since key framing is on and after we do that we just come right to the end and we bring it back to zero again so if we come to the beginning you'll see the wish but there's AIDS in a nice and fast and then it fades out just as easily with no weird blackness to it so that's how you create a fade for something like that and we've also explained the effects tab but let's say you really didn't like that we can also go back in the history so I didn't really like having that fade-out for some reason I want it to cut suddenly so I'll go back to this layer of the timeline so I believe now if we just move back a little bit and there's a light down on the rod so what just disappears because we've set our timeline a little bit differently for the history alright so now that we've gone over a few things a few things being the editor the media we've pretty much gone over the viewer pretty well although I have a few more things I need to mention about that effects history we can get into the audio mixer and we've also gone over the trimmer we have more stuff to go through in controls and viewer but then I think we're going to be about done so the audio mixer pretty much for every single audio track that you have it has the levels for it so the levels of loudness which is this bar right here and the levels for left or right ear so if you want say I don't know audio to is just our song so if we go to audio 2 and we want it only in the right ear for whatever reason it'll only play out of the right ear once we do that but I want to set it right back to 0 where it was because nobody likes hearing stuff like that but let's say we also wanted my voice to be a little bit louder than the music so I'll turn up my voice by a little bit and turn down the music by a little bit and you have much more control over the exact audio levels here and then right over here we have the master which controls every single piece of audio in the entire thing so you can drag that all over the place but generally I keep it at 0 0 and just modify each clip and just like with the opacity we can also set keyframes for these so you would just click on this and then select your certain points select your changes in the audio and it would automatically keyframe it for you again you can always go back to history to get rid of these weird keyframes if you made a mistake and accidentally set something somewhere that you didn't want to so you can always backtrack and find your way to what you're actually trying to do if you make a mistake all right so back to the controls tab will have this video selected right here as an example they have a few more things that we haven't played around with this the controls tab is pretty much more specific editing like I already talked about the opacity and what you can do with that but I haven't really talked about the other things like rotation you can set the rotation manually by using this wheel you can also drag right here to get your exact number if you want to or you can put in an exact number by typing it or you can come right here and hit 1 and that will be one X rotation 2 X rotation but you can't see any changes of course because one full rotation just puts it right back to where it was before so it's an absolute of 720 degrees that we rotated it like that of course you can do the key framing just like you could before so I'll turn it on right here and that has it has it at 0 rotations and then I'll fast forward to here and make it 1 rotation so if we back up a little we can see that it rotates so that's actually quite cool so let's go ahead and take a look at it real quick here so basically we have this tool the rod and so that was the full rotation that we got and we could get a partial rotation in these exact way of course and I'll turn off the key framing now because we don't really need to mess with that and that got rid of our keyframes that's another quick way to get rid of all of them you could just turn it off then back on and now we can go over scale hooray this as you may be able to imagine is the scale of zoom that your image is so you can zoom in really close like that by making the scale bigger you're making the video bigger pretty much or you can zoom out really far make it smaller and if you zoom out far enough it flips it upside down and it goes into the negative numbers so that's pretty cool you can do the same thing with key framing as you can with all the others although I'm not going to show you that because who really cares and then we have position that's pretty much using these red and green arrows on a more specific scale so I can move it that way a little bit move that way a little bit and I can make it a very specific number if I want to so negative 50 and that way I can get the exact positioning of whatever video that I want you can also set an anchor point and let me see if I can explain what this means basically the anchor point starts out in the middle of the video but you can move it around by dragging these things right here and it looks like it's moving the video and it sort of is but really the video is always in a relative position to the anchor point so when I change the anchor point the video moves relative to the anchor point which stays in the center of the viewer no matter what so that you can't lose track of it now that I moved the video to the side as you can see the video moves relative to the rotation from the anchor point that I'm giving it so I can make the anchor point even further away and then if we zoom out what you can do by holding ctrl and scrolling you can see that the video still rotates in reference to the anchor point so now let's go back and zoom in a little bit if you ever lose track of where you zoomed in just hit scale to fit and that will put it exactly it means to be and of course you can keyframe this as well so you can move the anchor point as you go through the video but I think you have the idea of what I mean when I say that you can keyframe things now so I'm not going to go over that very much from here on it so now back to the viewer here we can go to options and there's a bunch of things that you can make sure of right here so they have the playback quality I haven't set to draft because it's not very big and that pretty much gets rid of a good bit of lag but you can go too quick or fastest you can also go to playback resolution I have it set to full because my computer can handle it at least for now and we also have the paused quality which is final so that's whenever you stop the video what it's going to look like which I would recommend that you have your set to because that way whenever you pause the video say you're going for a specific frame to see what it looks like you'll really get the idea they're paused resolution again have that set to full it has the show motion path so if you have your video moving it shows how it's going to move on the screen they also have effect controls checkerboard background which I highly recommend background color don't really need that and you have export frame so if you want a certain frame from the editor so maybe for a thumbnail or whatever you can hit that and save that specific image from the video so we have one last thing to really go over before we get to the end of the video which is the export tab up here and that's the meters tab pretty much what this does is it shows you how loud your audio is as you watch through the video and it's not necessary if you've looked at your audio beforehand but if you haven't you might want it here because around this point if it gets up here your audio will probably start clipping or distorting or being too loud in general so you want to keep an eye on that and that's sort of what the meters help you to do and it shows the left and right on different channels so if you're using a stereo microphone where it detects different sound from different angles you're definitely going to want to keep an eye on this so you can see how loud the left or right ear is and maybe try and balance it out with the audio mixer over here and one final thing before we move on I almost forgot but in the viewer you can set the end point and the out point for the entire editor timeline now this isn't fixed you can select to export the content only but if you want a very specific in and out point all you need to do is scroll out in the timeline and select those points and if you can't scroll out because there's nothing there then there's a good chance you don't need to scroll out so if I wanted the out point to be set exactly at the end so right about here I would just come right here and hit set out point so we've moved the out point forward a little bit from the default five minutes that it is alright so now we're in the export area and right here we have the editor timeline that shows the in-and-out that we have and usually if you had composite shots and stuff which I might go in to in a later video if you leave a comment saying that you actually want that but you might have composite shots and stuff right here so you can decide which things you want to export but all we have is the editor because that's all we worked with so this is what we're going to want to export now you know you don't usually want the in and out points of the video you usually want to the content area at least for the types of videos I make and that probably applies to a lot of people who will be watching this video so all you have to do is hit right here and it contents so that'll put it in the queue to start exporting but be careful because before you do this you're going to want to make sure that you're exporting presets or what you want now I already have some presets I made for the 60 and 30fps varieties for 1080p but they have plenty of presets already here they have the YouTube 1080p HD and you can of course modify the preset by right-clicking and hitting edit preset the 1080p HD will probably work for some people frame rate is same as source with that you can have the variable frame framerate and it has a target bit rate and max bitrate of 16 which is definitely good or you can always make your own preset by hitting the new preset button right here and selecting mp4 is what I would recommend and you can mess around with the different settings in here but in general for most people you're probably looking at something pretty good with the 1080p preset I'm gonna go for the 60fps one that I made myself because that's the one that I like to use but it's just something to think about you can also delete presets if you made one that you didn't like yeah alright so now we can finally hit export contents and that creates this little thing right here in the exporting queue so you can export multiple things in an order in the queue if you want to but we want to name our video so I'm going to name it tutorial video template example thing hit enter and so that's gonna be the name when it's ready and you can also navigate to whatever folder you want it to be placed in here because it won't be placed in your videos folder by default I changed it to that generally it's going to be in a hit film export folder but I didn't want it there so yeah now all you need to do is hit start exporting and wait alright thanks a ton for watching if you guys would like more stuff about hitfilm in the future then just leave a comment that says that you would like to see that also over here they have the preview as it renders so it shows you what it's rendering yeah thanks a ton for watching I hope you guys enjoyed and I guess I'll see you all next time bye-bye

Channel: IridiumAxle

Views: 20,177

Keywords: fxhome, fx home, hitfilm, hitfilm express, video editing, editing tutorial, video editing basics, editing basics, video editing tutorial, timeline, viewer, media, youtube video editing software, youtube video editing tutorial, youtube video editing apps, how to, visual effects

Id: vuCFuvmheQU

Length: 31min 12sec (1872 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 03 2018