Hitfilm Express Full Tutorial for Beginners in Under 25 Mins

hey guys wes here from bluefx and today we have a really exciting video for you today we're going to be diving into a free to download editing program called hit film express which is actually yes 100 feet of dialogue i'll explain in a bit and we're going to be teaching you guys in under 25 minutes the basics of that program and how to edit at a beginner level in like i said under 25 minutes so before we start the clock hitfilm express is actually a multi-track editor made by the company fx home that's completely free to download they've done it as a project in order to give back to the filmmaking community that they have their roots in which is really cool of them and it's not only a multi-track editor but it actually has a full-blown compositor included in it as well which means you're essentially getting a minimized version of premiere pro as well as the effects in one package completely for free and since i'm assuming a lot of you guys are wanting to edit for your business and for youtube channels and stuff like that we're going to be using bluefx's free social media icons pack as well as a bunch of other assets along the way who knows um and that though the assets that we are going to be using in this tutorial are located in the description down below so you can click it and check those products out but we're going to be using them inside of hitfilm express so without further ado let's jump in there and get editing so here we are in hitfilm express this is the screen that you see immediately when you open it and because this is a beginner tutorial we're going to be starting from the get go so in order to start editing inside of this program what you want to do is click this button over here to start a new project and in here you'll be able to pick a template which basically tells the program what your specific videos that you're going to be working with is formatting so for example i record most of my videos or that from my camera at 1080p full hd at 25 frames per second and there's a whole bunch of other things here you know for 4k for gopro they make it really easy for you and even sometimes tell you the type of camera like these specific you know uh specialized cameras for the gopro and their types of formatting but for me i'm going to stick with standard old 1080p full hd and i shoot at where did it go now 25 frames per second the duration we don't really want to worry about because as you add clips headphone will automatically extend the timeline for you 1920 1080 frame rate 25 leave everything else as the same and then simply just click ok automatically a brand new project will be created and then headphone will launch it open and here we are so immediately what you can see is quite a few windows that could be overwhelming but what we're going to do is i'm going to break down every single one of these windows for you tell you exactly what they do and then we're going to go over some of the basic tools which we can find over here that you're going to be using as a beginner then we're going to import some footage as well as those free social media icons from bluefx and play around with it add a couple of effects and just show you guys the main features that you can use inside of hitfilm express as a beginner so automatically it's opened on the editor tab you know and that's basically the premiere pro or sony vegas pro i'm you know i'm just trying to make it relatable this is basically the main timeline where you do all of your multi-track editing but we will go over how to actually create a composite shot which sort of opens it film into the after effects or compositing side of software but let's first go over the different um screens and you know windows that we have here starting at the top right corner first we have the viewer panel this is the panel in which you will see whatever is on the timeline so if you can press play here you can skip a frame forward a frame backwards you can you know move the playhead to the start of the screen um on the timeline i mean um basically this is the window in which you view everything that's happening on the editor timeline basically your window so that you can see what you're actually editing and look at what the final product might actually look like your layer panel i wouldn't really worry about as a beginner but essentially if you double click a layer over here in the editor tab it will view this layer independently of all the others but again don't worry about that and then over here we have the export tab and as you can see i've ended out a whole bunch of things over a bunch of time but essentially what the export tab does is basically it's a window in which you can change the settings of your you know your presets for what you want to export everything that's in your timeline uh as and basically where you produce your final video moving on to over here we have the trimmer panel this panel allows you which i will show you to actually trim out portions of your video and edit the video a little bit just the starting and the end point before we drag it into the timeline and so when we actually import clips i'll show you how to do that the audio mixer contains all of your different audio levels for all of the different um audio channels as you can see we always have a master one and then we'll have an audio bar for every single audio track that we have um and right now i only have one audio bar and so this has the the bar for that and you can adjust you know the volume and things like that the layout panel again wouldn't really worry about it right now this has to do a lot with different text things that hit film can have because it's got a lot of different text features allowing you to create cool sorts of templates and intros and things like that but don't worry about that as a beginner moving on over here our second last panel we have the controls panel the controls panel allows you to change well exactly what it says the controls of your clip or your picture or your volume of your audio or add effects to it um basically you'll be able to change the scale the rotation the you know the axes and everything about your actual clip that you have selected in your edit in your editor timeline in the controls panel the lifetime panel again don't worry about it has a lot to do with a bit more complicated things that we might have to get into in another video but as a beginner don't worry about that right now the text tab exactly what it sounds like when you use the text tool which i'll show you guys some soon uh you can highlight the text and change all of the different values here you know the spacing of the text the font the style the size whether you want it to be strike through underlined and hit film has a lot more features for text than a lot of other programs and they keep on adding which is really cool the track tab again a bit more complicated it involves tracking another something we can maybe get into in a different video not really for this beginner style video and to our final tab we have the media panel which is one of the most important panels it's basically like a toolbox that houses all of the videos pictures music sound effects anything that you want to edit with you have to import which we call bringing into the software into this tab and then you can drag it from here into the trimmer panel or straight into the editor tab the effects panel basically another toolbox that basically houses all of headphones various effects things like color effects blur effects geometry effects grunge a whole bunch of exciting things sometimes i just sit and play through all of these different effects and try and i come up with brand new things and brand new looks it's really cool the history tab and another unique thing to hitfilm i've never seen a lot of other places it basically shows you your record of all the different things you've done and you're allowed to undo or redo them you know control z control y like in most programs i don't really use the history tab a lot but as a beginner it's definitely cool to see where you went wrong maybe you made a mistake you don't know where it happened how it happened and you but panicked go into the history tab you'll be able to see all of that and the processor tab again don't worry about it right now let's talk about more beginner things okay so i'm gonna go over the basic tools and if i'm going a bit fast guys please feel free to rewind the video go back a bit listen to what i'm saying carefully and i'm going over things quickly but as we start importing media and actually creating a bit of a sequence here and editing all of these things will make more sense so let's talk about the basic tools you're going to be using so you can find all the tools over here in the toolbar or up here some of the tools for selection as well so starting over here in the toolbar we have the selection tool if you press v on your keyboard it's the shortcut to select this tool this tool is basically this mouse cursor it essentially allows you to click and select things as you would with a normal pc or mac mouse then we have the hand tool as i like to call him the handy boy um what this basically allows you to do is move around inside your viewer panel which i'll show you later on especially if you're zoomed in using the zoom functionality maybe you want to zoom in on a specific part of a video when you're trying to clean up some of the color or you want to mask something specifically you zoom in over here and then you might find it difficult to get around inside here which is where you use good old handy boy and allow yourself to move around inside of this panel and obviously you can just click over here and click scale to fit which returns it to normal then let's stay up here talking about this text tool is basically just a text cursor which you'll find in my most um word type programs you can click and drag and draw a text box i'm going to just click ctrl z and undo that and then the final tool that i want to talk about for this beginner video is this tool the slice tool this essentially looks like a razer because you're allowing yourself to cut your video in two or three or four and delete certain sections again something we will get into right about now so in order to edit something inside of hitfilm what i want to do obviously is import some media for me to work on so the easiest way is to head into the media panel there's multiple ways you can drag things in you can double click but the easiest way just to click the import button and automatically a file browser is launched for you and this is launched in the last place that i imported media which is coincidentally where i'm going to be importing media this time so this video over here is actually the video that you saw before this which is the introduction to this um video for bluefx so i can doub i can click it and then i can click open and automatically this handsome face of mine appears inside the trimmer panel as you'll see and inside the media panel now if i deselect it inside the media panel and i select something else that will appear essentially the trimmer panel displays whatever clip is selected in the media panel i'll say that again the trimmer panel displays whichever video or picture is selected inside the media panel so let's use the trimmer panel to cut out some of the starting points as you can see i'm busy looking around i'm doing my claps to sync my audio i'm setting up the camera and over around maybe here i start talking so all of this space as you can see is actually dead space and we don't want that in the final video so let's move to the point where i'm just about to start speaking there we go and now obviously we want to fine-tune that point so i'm not cutting off a word and we can use the frame backwards previous frame of next frame tool so let's click it multiple times and here i'm about to start speaking here so we want to cut all of that out now you can do this inside of the editor tab which i will show you just now but if you want to just get rid of it inside the trimmer panel we just select one of these tools this is the set in point which means if i click this at this point where this dot is it deletes all of the previous video and then we can click a set out point as well which will delete the end portion but for now i'm going to keep the end and show you how to get rid of that inside here from there all we got to do is just click hold and drag into our timeline you can move to wherever you want but generally this is the first clip and i want to start it at the beginning so i'll drag it to the start and it does the snapping motion which snaps it to the beginning and boom we have our clip and it starts exactly where i want it to but you may be thinking well what about at the end as you can see at the end i'm still i'm you know i say my goodbyes i'm like okay guys see you and this is kind of a preview of what's coming up after this bit and then i stop speaking and i go switch off the camera we don't necessarily want that because it doesn't look professional to have me switching the camera off in our video in order to so in order to get rid of that we can do two different things one we can use these tools to go back and forward until the point let's zoom in on the timeline you can use the scale feature here let's zoom in we just pull this bar and then we go to where i stopped talking over here now we can do two different things in order to cut this portion out the easiest thing to do because it's at the end is just highlight over here until this bracket appears click hold and then drag it until it snaps again to the cursor and boom automatically we've ended right over there but this becomes a bit more tricky when you're somewhere like here maybe i made a mistake over here and i want to cut this p portion out here i can't drag anything because it's the middle of a clip so that's where we use our good old slice tool to make a cut so what we do is we find the point where we want to stop okay let's say it's here for example we'll select the slice tool we'll head over here automatically headphone makes it very easy for you highlights the cursor red we click once and automatically a cut has cut has been made there now if i click play as you can see nothing has changed because i've not done anything but let's say um this is a mistake i want to cut this out and over here i want to continue the video so again at that point i highlighted with the red with the slice tool click it again and boom this clip has been separated now still there's nothing different here because i'm still have the clip over there but now i want to delete this portion where i have the mistake so to delete this portion it's very simple as i said we use the select tool for almost everything else so let's select him over here let's click the clip over there and then simply just hit delete on your keyboard boom and it's completely gone now here lies the problem if we play through our clip we'll see everything's fine boom we're now in darkness and boom we're back obviously we want this to be a seamless transition so we'll just select the clip click hold drag and again hit film that's a beautiful snappy feature over here whoops there we go and now automatically there's been a cut and this is what we call in the industry the big buzz a jump cut there's different ways to do cuts you can do a j cut to l cut multiple things like that but for now this is what we call a jump cut so let's say towards the end of this video we actually want to add some elements into my video on top of my video now remember when i said hitbomb is a multi-track editor that means you're allowed to stack multiple clips on top of each other so for example at the end of um a video of mine usually i will like to plug my social media um and allow people to follow me over there in order to do that we can use bluefx's social media icon pack which is actually free for you to download in the description right now so let's bring that into the software i'm looking a bit dumb over here so let's just go to the beginning where i look a little less stupid um so let's bring bluefx's um social media kit which is by the way like i said free into the program remember how we import we go to the media panel we click on import and then we navigate in our computer to where i have it saved so i have it saved over here in pictures and here i have the folder when you download it you can just extract the files as you can see it comes like this you didn't just right click it and extract it using the program of your choice and you'll get a gift folder as well as an mov folder so back in hitfilm i want to use the mov since it's very easy to use all of the gif is also equally as easy and let's say i want to be plugging my instagram as well as my twitter so what i'll do is click instagram and then at the same time i will hold ctrl on my keyboard and i will also select twitter this allows me to select two different clips so when i click open boom both of them appear now remember what i said about the clip being selected that's what appears in the trimmer if i select my video that appears in the trimmer if i select twitter that appears in the drama but this video i don't really want to actually um cut out because it's just exactly what we need which is really easy and so what i'm going to do is head to the point in my timeline using the playhead where i want to drag this in and this checkered pattern by the way this shows you that the video you are looking at is actually transparent as you can see here there's no checkered pattern because it's a solid video but with this blue effects have made it really easy and we've made this transparent for you guys and basically what that means is when you drag this video on top of your video this chicken pattern disappears and this appears on your video as if it's part of the video so let's just drag it in and again remember what i said about multi-track editing we can drag it right on top and automatically boom out appears now do i want it to be covering up my hands and face not necessarily so this is where we're going to use the controls panel so the controls panel similar to the trimmer panel it will show you the controls for whichever clip you have selected not in the media panel but in the editor panel so if i select my video the controls for my video is here if i want to change anything you see i'm changing my video ctrl z to undo but if i select this video which is the twitter video i will now be able to control this so obviously what we want to do is we want to actually change the size of this so that it's not interrupting my face and we can put it here in the corner now to better see the corner let's just select the magnifying tool and let's go to about 25 okay maybe about 50 nope 25 was the sweet spot and uh let's maybe zoom in you can zoom in with the mouse wheel boom and now i have a bit more um you know sort of vision or i on english i have a bit more room to see what i'm actually doing so with the twitter logo selected in the controls panel let's reduce the scale until i'm happy with it that looks about fine and then we can use the position controls over here we can just highlight the middle and we can drag it wherever we want you can also use these if you want to go in straight lines you can even use the position controls over here in the controls panel but to make it easy let's just make it about maybe 30 scale wise and then let's just move it over here in the corner and that looks pretty good to me and if we go and we click play through on all of this we can see what happened and boom there's my twitter we can do exactly the same thing for instagram and add as many things on top as we want as long as it has a transparent background and obviously if you want to add things on top that don't have a transparent background it's fine as well it's just going to cover up things but if you want to have a picture in the corner you can just rescale that so that it fits in the corner nice and snug okay we've covered quite a bit of things here let's take a bit of a breather and then let's move on to a bit of the effects inside of head foam so heat foam has a really cool amount of effects over here so if we head to the start of our clip maybe not look so dirt there we go looking very energetic guys once again um let's say we want to click the clip and we want to add a bit of effects to it so for example let's say that i shot this on my camera in a very flat color profile which means that there's not a lot of color going on it's very flat so let's say we want to add some i don't know contrast so in order to add some contrast let's go to the effects panel and let's check what we can do under color correction oh there it is brightness and contrast that's really simple so we click the effect we click and hold and we drag it onto our clip it highlights green to tell us yep you have selected it and we let go but nothing has changed well that's because in the controls panel everything is set to zero so in order to um change this what we can do is actually just adjust the slider so if i push the brightness up it goes very bright and if i push the contrast up it goes very dark and so let's do a mild adjustment let's make this maybe i don't know and automatically our image is looking a lot better let's compensate with about five brightness and then maybe add a bit five more of contrast and boom we are basically color grading just like they do in the big in the big leagues in hollywood um and so you can play around with these sliders you can adjust it fine tune it zoom in in different parts of your video and see by the way i'm doing that zoom feature just by using my scroll wheel on my mouse and again we click the hand tool and we can move it around maybe i zoom in over here i want to move over there click the hand tool and i'm moving very fast in here because i'm very seasoned with this program i mean i know about all sorts of shortcuts for example if you hold down the right mouse button it actually activates the hand tool and i can move it around like that instead of having to select that but all these things you learn with time you can google shortcuts all these different things but that's just basically what you will get when you when you start editing a lot more frequently and if you're wondering did that color grade actually do anything well if we click this checkered box over here we can unselect it and look at the drastic difference that has made maybe we want to add more color let's go back in and let's see hue saturation and lightness let's drag it on and let's go to master and it's bump up the saturation by about 10. automatically my skin looks less than like a zombie and more alive i'm bringing myself back to life people let's make it about 12 and then let's turn that off and see what we did as you can see it's subtle but it does a lot in the long run and so you can add all sorts of effects to your clip you can add color grading effects for example these are add-ons which means you need to purchase them although they have a bunch of free ones as well you can click you can add an invert effect oops onto your clip look what happened there i now have a ghost looking thing you have all sorts of different things in here you can add light flares onto your effects for example look at this i add a light flare on and boom i have a light flare that i can move around there's so many different possibilities inside of headphone and it's all up to your imagination so hope you guys have enjoyed this little brief overview of hit film i haven't gone into a lot of detail it's just a beginner's look at it um we'll go into a lot more things if you request another video we can talk about compositing we can talk about text we're going to talk about all different things but essentially this is the basics of how to edit inside headphone express completely for free and that's how you edit for the first time as a beginner in hitfilm express completely for free in under 25 minutes hope you guys have enjoyed this if you want to check out any of the products that we did use that are from bluefx you can check them out they are linked in the description please leave a like on this video as well as share that with everybody that you know everyone that you possibly know including your cat as well as your pet goldfish they're also interested in video editing don't leave them out let us know in the comments down below what you think of this tutorial as well as what you think of blue pixels products as well as hitfilm um it's a really cool software it's really cool to be able to edit for free and some of the freebies that we have on our bluefx site make it even better hope you guys have enjoyed this video please subscribe as well and turn on the notification bell so that you are notified every single time that we have a new upload as i said for the 50th time hope you guys have enjoyed it and we'll see you in the next one

Channel: BlueFx Video Templates

Views: 6,602

Keywords: beginners tutorial, bluefx, complete tutorial, fxhome, fxhome hitfilm express, hitfilm, hitfilm 4 express, hitfilm express, hitfilm express 13, hitfilm express 14, hitfilm express 2020, hitfilm express 2020 tutorial, hitfilm express beginners, hitfilm express complete tutorial, hitfilm express course, hitfilm express crash course, hitfilm express full tutorial, hitfilm express tutorial, hitfilm express tutorial beginners, how to, learn hitfilm express, step by step

Id: nj7_V5trT4A

Length: 22min 31sec (1351 seconds)

Published: Sun May 23 2021