How to create CINEMATIC footage EASILY - Hitfilm Express Beginner Tutorial

you've got no experience with color grading but you want to make your footage look super cinematic today I'm gonna show you how to make your footage look really cinematic really easily in hitfilm today's video tutorial is going to be rated two stars out of five on the difficulty scale you won't need to have any color grading experience at all but you will need to know how hit film works also before we start this video make sure to subscribe to my channel if you want more hit film and video editing tutorials like this one and be sure to check out my twitter at shinee underscore films for more constant updates than i can give on youtube there are many things i'm going to show you in today's video but the first thing that we're going to do is to add contrast a general rule I mean there are lots of different styles and things you can go for when you know color grading your footage but a general rule if you make something look really contrasty then it'll look really nice and cinematic you don't want to go too far but you do want to have a nice level of contrast the way we're gonna have contrast added in our clip here is to just go to the effects panel and just search up for the brightness and contrast effect and we can just drag that straight in our video we'll move over into the controls tab up here and opening up the brightness and contrast effect we can just lift the slider to increase our contrast I'm also going to increase the brightness a little bit and adjust the contrast now we don't want to go too overboard for example this is very overboard and it doesn't look very cinematic the reason for this is that you've got a lot of really just completely black stuff and a lot of completely white stuff that's just completely blown out and we don't want to have too much of this stuff because that kind of looks less cinematic and you kind of lose detail and doesn't look very nice it's just not very pleasing to the eye it's a little bit too full-on so just drag the contrast slider a little bit down until you find somewhere that's you know not too bad you know when I have things too bright or too dark either so you can use the brightness slider to adjust that as well and I think that's a pretty good mark we've got some complete black stuff here but I think that's okay I'm just going to also quickly scrub through my footage to make sure that it's not too contrasty or too bright or anything it's the video I think the sky is very complete white over here but I think that's fine because the other parts are really nicely exposed and it's still nice in contrast so I think that's somewhat acceptable in this case so we've got our contrast our main contrast done this is our luminance contrast where we're pretty much just making everything that's you know darker darker and everything that's brighter brighter but another way to add contrast is with colors and the way we can do that is by adding opposite colors to different luminance values and what I mean by that is well let me show you we can just search up here for the color balance effect there are tons of different way to add color contrast but I found that the color balance effect is really just the easiest and the simplest to understand of all the effects down there so once you've dragged it onto your footage just open it up you'll notice we have three things we hear we have shadows mid-tones and highlights so we've got three sections here and each of them has a red balance a green balance and a blue balance and you can use those sliders to adjust the color in each of these different luminance values so you'll notice that if we grab the shadows and we just say increase the blue then everything that was dark is now really blue you can see all this yellow highlights here all the lights in the city are still you know their original color but all the dark stuff here in the sky and some of the buildings in here in the shadow it's all really blue and already we're actually kind of starting to see some nice contrast with the yellow but I'm just going to drag this down and we're going to have a little bit of a further adjustment in the shadows here I'm going to remove red and also remove a little bit of green and this will essentially be the same as adding blue except it'll make it a little bit darker and also remove a little bit more red in contrast to green so I'm just going to go I'm gonna actually gonna go quite heavy on this shot I'm gonna go negative 44 really just changes the color of this clip and also remove a little bit of the green because you'll notice here the sky looks really unnaturally green but if we just lower the green it looks more blue and more dark more sinister and it literally looks more natural but also really nice and cinematic and you know if we turn on and off the effect the skies become darker and more contrast see but also you know it's got less yellow you notice here everything has a kind of yellow haze to it if we check the color balance you'll notice it's more blue now and it looks really nice and contrasted with a more modern feel you can also increase the blue if you want but I'm just going to increase the blue a little bit and remove a little bit more here and then in the highlights I'm going to add some red just to pretty much reverse what I did here add some green and remove some blue I think I'll do that in the mid-tones as well because it's quite a dark clip and a lot of the stuff that would usually be in the highlights is actually in the mid-tones here so I'm just going to do some of that as well increase this here and already we have a super contrast clip you'll notice now that not only the colors it looks like the actual clip has changed luminosity as well if you want to you can click preserve luminosity and you see because we've removed a lot of red and removed all of green in the shadows it's actually darken the image and because we've added a red here and added green here it's kind of brighten the image and that's added contrast and if you didn't want that much contrast that much luminous contrast you can just hit preserve luminosity and we'll just make those color adjustments but I kind of like this really dark sky it's really nice and moody so I'm just gonna keep it like this actually and I'm just going to move over into here just to make sure all the rest of the clip looks good and you can see it's it's a little bit unnaturally blue here but actually kind of like that because the way that the time-lapse works it kind of you know slowly goes from this night scene into the day scene and I think of the way that the blue comes in it's just a really nice color cost and so I think I really like the way that the grade on this clip is going if we check the color balance you can see it's a ton more color contrast and it just looks more visually appealing and looks more like a film and so once we've got these two methods of contrast done there's of course a ton of different effects in your color correction and color grading if you want to you can add some lights and flares some light flares for you know if you've got a cinematic bright spot in your in your footage but the next step that we're going to do is actually very optional we're gonna add some grain and the grain of course is very optional because if you want a super modern look then you mind a 1 grain because grain can give it you know a kind of old filmic look but sometimes you want that and in a lot of cases you'll want that so as we notice here we add some grain it's uh it looks ok at the moment but it's a little bit ugly create some really weird color stuff in the sky and so what I'm gonna do is just gonna hit in monochrome and that'll make it more of a it's gonna be a kind of prettier grain still I think that's pretty nice and of course this is totally optional it's actually like you know reduce the quality of our video a little bit but that's just an artistic you know stylist stylish thing that you can add to your video if you want it to feel a little bit more like old school film and of course you can just any amount of grain with this amount slider but I think that the 20 is perfectly enough and in fact it's quite strong so if you want to maybe lower it to something like 15 or 10 again this is all totally optional if you want a more modern look you can definitely go and you probably should go without the grain and the final step to all of this is to add a letter box a letter box is black bars around the sides of the image and the reason to add a letter boxes is to change the aspect ratio of our video I'm just going to such a letterbox effect and just dragged on to our video at the end here the reason that the letterbox effect makes our VA look more cinematic is that if you notice a lot of feature films you know a lot of feature films are shown a lot of different aspect ratios but a lot of feature films are shot in a really wide aspect ratio most videos starting this 16 by 9 aspect ratio but films are often shot in this wider aspect ratio if you open up a letterbox effect you can even choose 4 by 3 which is kind of this advantage but if you want to super cinema look you can keep it with the 2.35 to one also you'll notice though that some of the parts of the bottom of the frame have really cut off and we've got quite a bit of sky here so if you want to you can kind of fix that by readjusting the crop of the footage but if you want to do that then you're gonna have to apply the letterbox a little bit differently I'm just going to select the letterbox effect and just delete it like so and if we want to readjust the position or apply the letterbox effect really easily over multiple Clips in our timeline what you can good do is just go to the media panel just go new plane and you can name the plane if you want I don't really care make sure it's white though and just hit OK and drag it onto a video layer above our original one my image is really sure I'm just going to extend it out and if you have multiple clips on this video one track you can extend it out above all of these clips then you can just search for the load box Affleck effect and apply it and now in the clip properties for the plane make sure you've got the plane selected in the clip properties you can select darken or multiply and now if you've got multiple Clips it'll go over all of them and if you want to readjust the position of the original clip just click on the original clip and move it and you'll notice it moves within those letter boxes so that's pretty much the end of the video guys I hope you enjoyed all the techniques that I've taught in this video can of course be adjusted instead of adding blue to the shadows you could add you know you'd add red to the shadows depends on your clip but generally blue looks nice because it's kind of a cool color in the shadows and red looks nice and warm in the highlights so you know that that kind of preset works really well but of course you can go for a flatter look you can go with or without grain and of course there are a ton of effects down here that you can mess around with as well I hope you enjoyed today's video if you did then be sure to subscribe to my channel of course and you can check out these videos over here as well if you feel like leaving a comment leave a comment and of course like this video it really helps me out and of course I'll see you in the next video stay shiny

Channel: Shiny Films

Views: 246,409

Keywords: cinematic, color, color grading, tutorial, how to, hitfilm express, hitfilm, hitfilm 3 express, vfx, hitfilm 4 pro, editing, visual effects, hitfilm 3 pro, hitfilm pro, hitfilm 4, free, 3d, film, color correction, compositing, software, video editing, effects, filmmaking, film making, after effects, dslr

Id: wdLsIq9_Cw0

Length: 11min 10sec (670 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 04 2018