How to Edit Videos FREE for YouTube with Hitfilm Express - Beginners Tutorial

hey everyone today we're going to show you how to edit YouTube videos for free using hitfilm express this is a beginners tutorial so check it out hey everyone it's ken here from northern viking everyday and if you are new to this channel it is all about reviews and how to's so make sure you click that subscribe button so you don't miss out on any upcoming videos today we're going to show you how to edit YouTube videos or videos for any platform for that matter or personal use or teaching using a free piece of software called hitfilm express now this is a beginners tutorial so we're not going to show you things like color grading or composite shots we're gonna do a beginner's tutorial so if you're just starting out with hitfilm this is the perfect video for you now if you don't have hitfilm yet you can download it from FX home comm i'll put a link below in the description once you come to their website just go ahead and click on download hitfilm express and once you've done that now the way hitfilm works is they give you a great piece of software for free and but you can do add-ons onto it I haven't actually purchased any of these I created a couple hundred videos for my two youtube channels using hitfilm express but there's so much in the basic version but if you want to add on to these you can do that as well but to get the free version just slide the face here over to the left to the $0 then go ahead and click download here and once you do that it's gonna give you the option to download for Windows or Mac and make sure you read through this because there is a serial number here if you do need it as well so once you've got that downloaded we're gonna go through a whole bunch of different segments for you and all of them are time-stamped down in the description below so we're gonna go through how to insert videos well show you how to cut and trim them slow motion and speeding them up as well as basic transformation so zooming in or rotating your video transitions adding music adjusting the volumes and exporting your video so that's what we're gonna be going through today so let's jump on over to my desktop and get right into it alright so once you've got hitfilm loaded up on your computer it's going to look something like this and we're gonna want to open a new project so in the top left hand corner you are gonna see an option that says new if you have an existing project that you're working on you could go ahead and click open but we're going to go ahead and click new today and once you do that a new project settings window is going to pop up right in the middle and we need to set some settings for our project so we want to set the resolution and the frame rate right here in template you can go ahead and select that so if you're making Instagram videos or 720p videos 1080p which is what we're doing today full all the way up to 4k you can select what resolution and frame rate works well for you so we're gonna select 1080p 30 frames per second now the other thing we want to select is the duration so I like to make the duration of our project longer than the project we're actually working on so today we're gonna be making a one and a half minute video I'm gonna leave that on 5 minutes that's the default here but if you're making a 10 minute video maybe set that to 15 minutes so you have enough time to work on your project now you can change this later if you need to but it's easier to set it up right at the beginning once you've done that you can go ahead and hit OK it's gonna start loading up that project for you and making a new project now I do want to say as you're watching this video everything that you're seeing today has been edited in hitfilm express as well so everything you're watching is done in hitfilm alright so once you've loaded up your new project its gonna look something like this now if it doesn't look like this what you want to do is change what the window looks like or the or the workspace so if you click on window at the very top there there's an option right at the top that says workspace and I'm using the workspace that says editing so you could go ahead and click on editing and it's gonna load it up and it'll look just like mine here so let's give you a quick overview of what is on this screen let's stop start in the top left hand corner this is your media area and when you load your video clips or audio it all goes in that area you've got controls so there's a few different tabs here there's media and then there's controls here this is once you have clips in there where you can adjust the size the rotation different things like that and we'll get into all that in just a little bit right here in the middle this big open space and in in just a little bit you'll see this is all full of stuff so it's not gonna look blank like this for very long you've got the trimmer as well as the audio mixer over here on the right at the top you've got your viewer so when you're watching your video as you're editing it it'll show up right up here you've got layer and export in the tabs up there moving down this main area is your editor or your kind of timeline where you've got a video timeline and an audio timeline now you can have multiple video timelines in here and multiple audio timelines so if you want talking and background music you'd have multiple audio timelines and the same with video so if you wanted to create more video timelines you just right click or you could do the same with audio just right click and insert track and you can see it says video 2 and maybe will do with the same with the audio insert track and you've got audio too now think of this as layers so if you've got a picture and you want to add text on top of it your text would go in video 2 so it's over top of your of your picture or your your video so anything that is higher up so video 2 would be stacked on top of video 1 so that is your editor window now there are some tools here that are really small the main ones we're gonna be going through and using today would be the arrow right here which is your selection tool and the shortcut for that is V we're gonna use that shortcut quite a bit and the third one down is your slice tool and this cuts your clips and the shortcut for that is C and those are the main ones we're going to be using today and then over here on the left hand side you've got effects so in this area you're gonna find all sorts of different stuff this is where if you are gonna do color correction or different things like you'd find that in here there's audio and video transitions in here as well so we're going to be using video transitions today um there's also history here in this tab and text and we're not gonna use history but we will add a title to our video as well so that's kind of a main overview of the whole hitfilm express user interface now the first thing we want to make sure we do is save our project so up here at the top under file you can go ahead and hit save as and from here you can just go ahead and save your project let's do test video one two three four it doesn't really matter what it's called but that's what our project is gonna be called today and just hit save and that is saved out you can see the file name in the top right hand corner and I have this set to autosave every two minutes so if you want to set that to autosave you can just hit file options and there's an option here that says auto save and every two minutes my file will save you can adjust that right there so other than that you can just hit ctrl s to save it or file save right here so make sure you do save your your file from there let's go into adding our video clips pictures and audio all our media into our project so what we're gonna do is in this area at the top left hand corner make sure you do have media selected and there's a couple different ways to do this one way would be to just click on import that's gonna bring up a window here where you can search your desktop or your computer for your clips these happen to be the clips that I do want to add to my project so I'm just gonna select this one here I'm gonna leave the first one there of my face for a moment I'll show you that how to import that with the second method and I'm just gonna hold down shift and use my arrows on my keyboard to highlight all of the clips that I want to move into hitfilm express so once I've got those all selected I'm just gonna go ahead and click open and you can see they're all importing right into hitfilm express so once those are in there that would be the first method to do the second method would be to just open up the folder and here's that picture of my or that video of myself I'm just gonna drag and drop that in there I find that to be the easier way to to import my media so once you've got all your clips or media in there and you can add more of them as you're going along if you find more pictures or different things you want to add halfway through your project it's no problem to add them later we're gonna move into showing you how to move these clips into time line so I gotta just actually put on my headset here so I can hear what's going on in the video and once I've got that on what we want to do is start moving our clips into the timeline now there's a couple of different ways to do this I am gonna show you the first way which is the trimmer way so up here you're gonna see audio mixer and there's trimmer I don't typically do it this way but I'll show you how to do it this way some people really enjoy doing this so select whichever file you do want to insert so for myself let's go with this main go profile now this is a hyperlapse video I film so it's a high-speed walk around the park that's going to be the main portion of our video it's actually gonna be the second clip we use in the video but I'm gonna put it in first so let's go ahead and click on that so it's in your in your trimmer of it with window here and we can just go ahead and click play so you can see that it's moving through that now we want to select where we want this video to start so maybe we'll want it close to the beginning right about here and there's a couple of different options here you can see there is a one that's a square with an arrow to the right and it says set end point so if I click on that it's gonna add the end point and if I hit play or I can even zoom or scroll all the way to the end maybe I just want to take off the last couple seconds here and I'm gonna hit this other square with the o arrow and that's going to take off the end of it so now I've trimmed off the beginning and the end of this video clip and now we want to insert it into our timeline below so if there's talking you could start it right before your talking and end it right after your talking wherever you want to in that clip so from there we just want to hit there's these two envelopes here on the kind of right hand side of that window and this one on the left hand side says insert clip or B is the short cut so I'm gonna go ahead you could click there I'm just gonna hit B on my keyboard and that's gonna drop that down into my video area down here below so that whole clip with the front and the end chopped off is down here at the bottom so that's the the first method of inserting clips I don't really like that method and I'm gonna show you why here in a moment when I will insert this clip of myself the second way to insert them is to actually drag them down and just drop them in here so you can see you take the video and drop it in the video 1 and you can see it inserts it in there now this is why I don't like using the other other method and if you want to zoom in there's a slider right here so you can do that you do that just so you can find it this is why I don't like that so if i zoom in here when you have it in here and you cut your video in here you can see where you start talking so because of all the audio levels here at when I'm talking so if I hit play here you can see exactly where I start talking and I can't see that very easily up top so I know that if I want to just get my talking portion I can just go right to before where I start talking and cut it right here so in order to cut this we showed you that cut tool here it's the third one down on the left or slice tool you can go ahead and click on that or hit C and once you've done that just move this bar to wherever you want to cut it and we're just gonna go ahead and hover over that bar and it turns red and you can just left-click on your mouse and it's gonna cut or slice your video clip right there so once you've done that you can go ahead and select the arrow there or I like to hit V on the keyboard and I can just highlight the clip that I wanted to light delete so if I wanted to delete this clip I highlight that or if I want to click this delete this clip I highlight that I could just go ahead delete on my keyboard and now when I start this from the very beginning it's gonna start right where I start talking now if I want to play this you can see the video in the top right hand corner here is has a play button here I'm gonna actually turn this back to audio mixer so it doesn't mix you up which video where which screen we're looking at if I hit play here or I can hit the spacebar on my keyboard I find that easier to play and pause but you can hit that play button so if I hit the spacebar hey everyone today we're gonna be filming our nature walk in this beautiful park so check it out and now I can hit pause after I stop talking I can hit C again to cut or hit the razor tool and once I do that well there we go the razor tool make sure that's orange and just slice it there hit v2 go back to the arrow or the Select tool highlight that and just hit delete so you can easily remove the beginning or the end of your videos so that's that would be exactly how you do that now that's one way to edit in and cut and trim so let's go ahead and move our Clips together so we've got our our hyperlapse and our introduction now one thing I do want to say let me zoom in here again there is something called snapping and what snapping does is when I move this clip over you can see as I get close to the edge here it's going to turn red with a line so I know that I'm not overlapping the clips so that's called snapping where it automatically butts it together with the other one now if that's not happening for you down at the very bottom it's really small right next to the audio there you're gonna see what looks like a horseshoe and if that's off all of a sudden I do this and they can overlap so you want to make sure that you're snapping is on so go ahead and select that and then you can slide that up and it'll just butt right against it with the red line and you can release it so now I've got my two Clips together so that would be that would be how you move them together now I want to take this big clip and I want to start inserting some maybe a couple more Clips within that clip so we're gonna actually slice this clip up to add more clips within it so I've got a few Clips here I've got some a picture of flowers and as well I've got a picture of the tree so let's watch through this and find a good spot to put the flowers in maybe actually where we started there was actually pretty nice let's go right about there there's some flowers so again if we wanted to cut our clip here just hit C hover over the clip and when it's red just left-click on your mouse and it's going to cut that clip V to go back to your pointer tool or just selection tool just hit there and you can move your Clips apart and add another clip in between there so I have this picture of a flower I'm just gonna drop it right in there or this is actually a video of the flower and when I do that it's gonna go right to that next clip and so I've got that clip I don't actually want it to be quite that long so again I'm gonna quickly trim off the beginning and the end so bear with me while I do that all right so now I've got this flower clip here and that is exactly what I want now I don't really want the background noise in in this clip because there's cars driving by different things like that so I'm gonna show you a couple of different ways to turn down the background noise the one would be to just select the audio here and lower this white bar right down to the bottom that's probably the easier way to do it or you could delete the audio portion now these two clips are tied together so when I move them and moves the video and the audio together as you can see but what we want to do is unlink them so because there's a chain there it means the two clips are linked together so if I right click click on it I could hit unlink and as I do this watch that chain disappears and now I could just go ahead and select the audio clip and just hit delete on my keyboard and that is gone so that would be how you would easily delete those so so that's basically how you would cut and trim your clips as you're putting them into your editor timeline so it's quite easy to do now I do want to show you how to do slow motion and speeding up of your Clips so I'm gonna just grab that same clip and put it right over here at the end and in order to do a slow motion or speeding up of your clip if you want it to slow something down I'm gonna turn down the volume here so we don't have to listen to it it's quite easy to do so you've got your clip here and we're just gonna right click on it let me just move this over a little bit we're just gonna right click on it and what we want to do is there's an option here that says speed and duration so if I click on that it's gonna allow you to adjust the speed and duration of that video clip so right now it's at a hundred percent which is the speed that was recorded at and you can see it's eight second eight point one four seconds so we're going to go ahead and change that to 500% and see what happens when you change it to 500% it's basically fast-forwarding that clip and it's gonna shrink it right down so let's go ahead and click that it made it really small and when I go ahead and play over it it just makes it really fast if I wanted to slo-mo it I right-click on it again and do a speed and duration and I could go ahead and make that 50% it makes the clip 17 seconds long and these flowers are not going to be swaying nearly as much in the wind so it's gonna be quite smooth now that being said you do need to keep your frame rates in mind if you are slowing something down that doesn't have very many frames it might look jumpy when you've exported it so you might want to play with that a little bit to see what works well with the frame rates that you've recorded in so speeding up or slowing down your clips that is exactly how you would do it and it's really easy to do so I'm just going to delete that one I'm not gonna actually use it in my video but again it's really easy to do alright so let me go ahead and finish editing this video and then we'll move into transformations and we'll do some transitions and texts so hold on one second [Music] all right so I got all my video clips together here and we're gonna move into basic transformations or controls of the video so what I want to show you how to do is how to maybe adjust the size or zoom in a little bit on one of these videos if you have to rotate one straight you can do that as well so let's go ahead and just actually pick this one that's actually a picture here at the end so we'll show you once it's a picture the process is exactly the same for a video as well once you've got the clip selected there over on the left hand side at the top where it says media we're gonna want to click on controls up here and you're gonna see an option here that says transform and when I click on transform it's gonna give you a few different options so again make sure that clip that you want to adjust is selected and if we want to adjust the scale zoom in arrow you can see it says a hundred percent right now you can just slide this to the left or the right now this one was zoomed in quite a bit because it was a picture so the resolution was quite high so we're gonna zoom that out now a couple other things you can do here you can adjust the rotation so you can turn that if you want to move something sideways maybe you took the picture crooked or the video crooked you could fix that now one thing I do want to say is if you're zoomed out quite a bit you can see so if I have the straighten or turn the picture like that and zoom in I have to zoom in quite a bit for the whole picture to actually fit in the video screen so we want to make sure that we're adjusting it and then zooming in if we are rotating it so it it looks good and the whole screen is covered the other thing you can do is adjust the position right here as well so you can move your photos or videos back and forth to the left or right as well as up and down so maybe that's exactly how I want that to look I can just do that right there now if I wanted to do the same thing way of these other flowers here as well just highlight them and move my gray bar here to over them so I can see it in the screen and maybe I just wanted to zoom it in a little bit so it's a little bit closer I'm gonna you could type it in here as well so let's go head and type in 105 percent and watch what happens is just gonna zoom in slightly to that that video so you can adjust things exactly like that as well and that's quite easy to adjust basic transformations in your video clips and your picture so it's quite easy to do now the next thing we want to do is add transitions now this is where it gets fun and if you're not sure what transitions are they are maybe different blends or things that go across the screen between your video clips so for example you what happens is you put that on between your clip and maybe the whole screen goes out to the side or something like that and to find your effect are your transitions there under the effects tab here on the left you can scroll down near the bottom you're gonna see an option that says transitions video and if you click on that there's a whole bunch in here that are free so there's dissolve transitions which kind of blends the two pictures together and under that there's additive dissolve cross dissolve dither dissolve I do like the cross dissolve one I use that quite a bit under motion there's it pushes the clip aside or slide or split there's wipe so clock wipe linear lay white there zooms and then there's cross fades and iris so the way you insert these and I'll let you play around with it more but zoom in on your video and you're gonna want to grab one of these and drag it and drop it right where the two Clips meet so let's go ahead and we'll do a cross dissolve right here at the middle so just grab that and drag it across and you can see if you hover over where the two video clips meet you can just drop that on there and it added that in there now if you do want to make the transition longer you can just hover over it or to the side of it and it makes your cursor kind of go squiggly and you can actually drag it out or shrink it so that's how you would do that and let me add some more I'll add them to all of them so this one's the push will do the slide and in the final product you can see what this is gonna look like when we're all done that's the split we'll do a clock wipe I'll just do them all different here linear way and let me finish these up and then we'll move on to the next step all right so I've got all my transitions in there and they're all different ones so you can see what the different ones look like I didn't get them all in there but you'll be able to see most of them when you watch the video a little bit later all right so the next thing we want to do is add some text to our to our video so let's add an introduction title to our text and you can actually add transitions to your text as well so they slide on to the screen or they dissolve out of the screen so we'll do that as well here in a moment so as I had mentioned earlier the video 1 and video - are layers so if we want our text to go on top of our talking picture here at the beginning we want to put our text in video 2 so it shows up in video 1 if you were to have the text in video 1 in your and your video in video 2 you wouldn't see your text because it would be high be behind your your video clip so I hope that makes sense for you so in order to add text here at the beginning at the top right hand corner you are gonna see an arrow another arrow there's a hand but there's also a a here and this is your text button so if I go ahead and select that it's gonna allow me to create a text box here so once I've got that selected you could go into your video clip here make sure this gray bar is where you roughly want it to start and we're just gonna go ahead and drag that out and you can see it created a text box right where I wanted that to start now we can move that around and stretch it out here in just a bit but we can go ahead and start typing what we want our title of our video to be and we're just going to call this one maybe I'll do it all cups walk in the park whatever you want to call it just for the sake of this video that's what we're gonna call it so once you've got that in there we're gonna go ahead and select or highlight our text and now we can change how that text looks so once that's highlighted go ahead and down in the near the effects tab here at the bottom left you're gonna see another tab that says text and if we click on that in here you can start manipulating the text so changing the the font the color as well as the if you want it centered or left aligned different things like that so why don't we go ahead and change the font here it's an Arial right now let's go ahead and change it to Berlin sans but again you can go through these so you can see it change the font there as soon as I did that let's go ahead and change the size as well so when that's highlighted right now it's at a 48 font let's go ahead and change that to maybe 80 let's see what happens and made it a bit for a bit bigger and let's change the color let's change it to yellow so it matches the flowers so in this box here where it's white you can just go ahead and select that and you can change it to whatever color you like so blue red you can pick them in there but we'll just select this yellow one and hit OK and now you can see that the text changed to yellow so in order to actually move that text around there's an arrow up here as well or you could hit the V button but we're gonna hit the arrow it's gonna actually brighten that up and we can actually move the text to wherever we want it I'll leave it actually in the top left hand corner but now you've got your text in there and the way you want it to look but now we want to just move it around and make sure it comes in and out exactly where we want it to so I'm gonna just grab this bar here in the middle and lower it down so this text can be moved around wherever we want it to so I actually wanted to come in right at the beginning of the video and I want it to go out right as this first clip ends so it's really easy to do that we could actually you could click on this rate stretch tool right here at the bottom it's kind of two arrows with a squiggle and we can just drag that out and that's gonna drag it right out to the end of our clip all the way the other way you could actually if I hover over the end of my clip here I could actually because this clip isn't isn't a video clip we could actually just drag it in and out here and I would do the exact same thing as well so that's how you would do that now let's go ahead and add some transitions to that as well so again back to the effects tab maybe we want this to slide in at the beginning and to cross-dissolve out so these are under our transitions so we're just gonna drag and drop those in there and now when I play the beginning you're gonna see that texts come sliding in hey everyone today we're gonna be filming our nature walk in this beautiful park so check it out now it disappears as the clip in so that's exactly how you would add text it's really easy to do and you can add your transitions and make it look all fancy so we've got our text done now to move on to adding music which is lots of fun and makes your video look really cool or sound really cool so again I'm gonna zoom out so we can see the whole video here and again you can slide this back and forth if you want to go through your whole clip if it's longer than what you see on the screen and we want to add our music to audio too so we've got our talking in audio one we want to add our music to audio 2 so we can adjust the volume of them separately so in order to add our music now if you're looking for good music for free that you're allowed to use on YouTube if you go to your your creator studio or YouTube studio and they have an audio library in here where you can download royalty-free music and use that in all your YouTube videos so that's a great place to find free music and that's where I found this piece of music here under our media that I've already uploaded on the beach so I'm gonna drag this on the beach file into our audio too and just drop it in there and you can see it's actually a really good length you can see the noise profile here it's really good length audio for our video clip so we've got that in there but when I play it it's gonna be really loud so let's go ahead and just hit play at the beginning and you can hear that hey everyone today we're gonna be filming our nature so we can't actually really hear ourselves talking so make sure you have audio mixer up here and this will be how you adjust the volumes in your music so again we just showed you how to add music or audio and the way I added that audio clip you can actually add if you're doing voiceovers for your video just doing the exact same thing as you did to add music alright so to to adjust the volume here there's a couple different ways now we're gonna just be looking at this audio to hear the second one and the easiest way to do it is to just there's a little black dot audio level and I like to bring background music down to probably about minus 24 so now when I play it hey everyone today we're gonna be filming our nature walk in this beautiful park so check it out it's just nice and quiet in the background so that's the way I like to do it you can play around with the levels as you like if I'm finding my talking too loud or too quiet I can just adjust audio one because that's where my talking is in the editor timeline below so one thing I did notice is that our audio clip here our music runs past the end of our video clip so we are going to want to trim off the end of that audio clip then that's really easy to do so again we can just hit C for our slice tool and because our snap is on we can go roughly to the end of our video clip and just go down to our audio clip and you can see that red line does appear because of the snap tool and we can just go ahead and left-click on our mouse and that's going to cut that we can just hit V to have our selection tool brought up and select that end of that clip and just hit delete on our mouse and it's not easy to trim off the end of an audio clip so that's how you would add your music and adjust your volumes and now that we've done that we just need to move on to our final step which is exporting our video which is quite easy to do as well so we've got our whole video here and once we've exported it I'll I'll show this whole video to you so you can see how it turned out so one last thing you do want to make sure that at beginning your your project setup if you selected five minutes as we talked about at the beginning that your video is not six minutes long so in order to just of course we only have a less than a minute long video here but if you did go over that time we're just going to want to hit file project settings and you can adjust the length of your video right here so once we've got this all done we just want to go ahead and click up here on the there's these lines right next to where it says export in your editor tab and when you click on that there's a few different options here I like to use the one that says add to queue and then I select this one that says contents and when I do that it's gonna pop our whole project up into the export window up in the top right so you can see it popped up up there in the top right hand corner you can see I have some other projects finished editing or finished exporting and this is one other place you might want to make a change if you do want to here you can click this drop down and adjust the output format again I like to leave this on 1080p HD for YouTube and there's a button here at the top right hand corner that says start exporting and when you do that it's gonna start exporting now I do want to just mention if you did want to change the output location for your video so it shows you that output here you would just go to file options and it is under export right here and you can change your export location of your file but do that before you hit the export button there so once you've got that all set up just go ahead and hit start exporting let's go start exporting and usually this takes for a project this size probably 2 or 3 minutes for a project on my computer now if you're using a slower computer it might take a little bit longer or if you have a faster computer it might be a little bit quicker so for me it's already at 10% done so once this is done we'll jump right into showing you this video so you can see how it turned out and check out all those transitions hey everyone today we're gonna be filming our nature walk in this beautiful park so check it out [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so hope this video was able to give you value and learning how to video edit for YouTube using hitfilm express if it did make sure to give this video a thumbs up also if you're interested in learning about what equipment I use all that's listed below in the description and hey make sure to connect with me on social media and subscribe on YouTube those links are all down there as well thanks so much for watching today and until next time take care [Music]

Channel: Northern Viking Everyday

Views: 15,485

Keywords: how to edit youtube videos, how to edit youtube videos for free, hitfilm, hitfilm express, hitfilm express tutorial, how i edit my youtube videos, how to edit videos, how to edit videos for youtube, video editing software free, best free video editing software, free video editing software for pc, video editing for beginners, video editing free, free video editing, how to video edit, how to edit videos on laptop, intro to video editing, basic video editing, Video editing basics

Id: CWz_A-cpnxs

Length: 36min 20sec (2180 seconds)

Published: Tue May 05 2020