Hey guys, thanks for joining us for
another video in our HitFilm Basics Masterclass. If you missed any of the
other tutorials in this series we have covered quite a few topics already so be
sure to check out the playlist in the description if you missed any of them. In
this tutorial, we're going to take a look at keyframing, which is how you animate
things inside of HitFilm, and motion tracking, which is how you attach
elements to things in your video. Let's take a look at this example inside of
HitFilm. I've got some footage of a forest, which maybe comes from a vlog or
travel video, and I've got some text that pops in saying where the location is,
but I'm not a fan of the way this text currently just appears. It doesn't really
match the smooth camera movement that I'm going for. So let's start with
something simple and make the text fade in. To do that what I'll do is come back
over here to the beginning and I'll go ahead and zoom in on the timeline. The
thing about keyframing is that it's very important where your timeline indicator
is, so this line right here, it makes a difference where you place the keyframes.
To start I'll place it right at the beginning of the text. I'll select the
Text Layer so that it's active inside of the Controls panel, and then I'll come
over to Opacity which is the transparency. Keyframing can be activated
on any setting that has this circle to the left of it.
Right now it's turned off so I'll just go ahead and click it once to turn it on. You can see that the outline turned orange and this means that keyframing is
now on. Now, at the beginning, I want the opacity of the text to be zero, so I'll
go ahead and turn that down until it's invisible. Now I can either hit play or
just click and drag the timeline indicator to go ahead to where I want
the text to fade in. At this point I'll come over and just drag the slider up to
100% and you can see that on the timeline we have a visual representation
of the keyframe, it's going from 0 up to 100% over the course of this time. You
don't have to click the circle every time you want to make a keyframe, you
just have to change the value that it's representing. if you click the circle
again it'll turn off and delete all of the keyframes. Now if I play it back you
can see that the text fades in nicely and it matches the smoothness of the
camera movement a bit more. If I wanted the text to fade out after a couple of
seconds I could come over here a little bit later, giving the audience a chance
to read it, and then what I'll do is select the Opacity,
and there are two ways to do this, you can either select the number you're
already on and hit enter - this will create another keyframe, or if you select
that property and then come up here, you'll have a couple of keyframe buttons.
So, in this case, Toggle Keyframe will add a new one into the timeline, then I'll
skip ahead a bit more and bring the opacity back down to zero. You could use
the controls on the timeline here but they don't always appear for every
parameter, in this case, it's just Opacity. So now I have some text that fades in,
lingers, for a second or two, and then fades out. As I mentioned earlier, any
setting that has the circle to the left of it can be keyframed so for example I
could also make the Text scale or grow over time. If I come over here and
activate keyframes for Scale I can do something similar. So maybe I'll have it
start at 40% Scale, and then over time, grow to 80% so it'll double
in size. You'll notice that we don't get a representation of the Scale on the
timeline like we do with Opacity. You can see that the text now fades in and grows
over time. You could do the same thing for Position or Rotation, any of these
keyframe-able properties. If you want to be able to see the actual keyframes what
you want to do is give yourself some space and then select the property that
you're wanting to view. In this case, let's take a look at Opacity. Then I'll
come up here to this button which will display the keyframe timeline. We'll get
another timeline, similar to the one over here on the right, but this one will only
show the keyframes. So I can zoom in and you can see that each of the properties
is displayed here. So here we have the to Scale keyframes and down here we have
the four Opacity keyframes. So if I wanted to adjust the timing of the Scale
keyframes I could do that and I could make it slower, or if I move it over here
to the left it'll make it much faster. To demonstrate the other keyframe types I'm
just going to turn off the Opacity keyframes for a second because it'll be
easier to see. So I'll remove those but I'll leave the Scale keyframes on. These
keyframes are linear which means they go from A to B in the same amount of time. We have a couple other options as well if you want to make things a bit
smoother. So right now it's set to linear and this is what it looks like - the text
is the same size and then it grows at the same rate the entire time. What I can do is come over here and select these keyframes, and I can
highlight both of them by clicking and dragging, and up here we have a couple
different keyframe types. So Constant, which is the second one, means the
keyframe won't interpolate, it won't grow, it'll only snap to the next property. So
if I hit play here you'll see that it's the same size until it's not. And that
will happen in a single frame there's no growing, there's no interpolation between
the two values, it just snaps to whatever the next one is. Another example is
Smooth which is a popular one. This adds a little bit of curve to the beginning
and end of the movement so that it's a little bit more fluid and not as jerky
or sudden. Then we have Smooth In and Smooth Out which only affect one side of
the keyframe. And finally, we have Manual Bezier which is a bit more complex and
we're probably not going to get into that in this video but it allows you to
adjust the value graph so you can fine-tune the exact movement of the
keyframe if you wanted to do that. Here's another example where we have some text
pop in. Maybe I want to have it slide in from the left, then maybe do a little
bump to have some animation. So what I'll do is come over and activate keyframes
for the Position property. Now I can move this text off-screen, it doesn't matter
if you alter the position of the text after you activate keyframes, it just
matters that wherever it is on that frame, that's what the keyframe is going
to be. So then I'll skip forward a little bit and bring the text back in and maybe
I'll overshoot it just a little bit from where I actually want it to be. Then I'll
skip forward a couple of frames and bring the text back. Then this will give
it a little bit of a bounce. Since we've added motion to this Text, technically, it
should be blurry. So to do that, what I'll do is select the text and come into the
clip properties, there's a section for Motion Blur. If I checkmark that you can
see that the title will automatically blur based on the movement. This is
important if you're keyframing things like Position, Scale or rotation, where if
it's moving quickly, it should also be blurred. This is what it looks like now. Now that we've covered the basics of keyframing, let's take a look at
motion tracking. Motion tracking is used quite often to attach things into your
video. In order to begin motion tracking inside of HitFilm Express we need to
learn about composite shots, which we haven't touched on at all
yet inside of this masterclass. In HitFilm, we've been staying on the Editor
timeline, which is this main one here, and you can have multiple clips one after
another and it's how you assemble a basic edit. A composite shot is a space
where you can work on one specific clip and add multiple layers on top of each
other in order to interact and create visual effects. Let's take a look at that
now. You can create a blank composite shot from the Media Panel under the New
section. If you have a clip already in mind, you can do that as well
if you right-click on it and then select Make Composite Shot that will work, or, if
it's already on the timeline, you can right-click again and then select Make
Composite Shot. This will take us into a new area that we've not seen before. If
you want to go back to the Editor you can do so at any time by clicking this
tab here. As I mentioned, Composite Shots are for one specific shot so typically
it'll be the exact length of the clip that you're editing. Let's say we wanted
to add some text into this clip but have it follow the camera shake and movement
to make it a bit more interesting. The first thing about motion tracking is
that you need to attach the data to a Point. So HitFilm is going to track the
motion of this clip and it needs a way to remember all of that data and the way
we're going to do that is by putting it inside of a new Point Layer. So I'll come
over here to New Layer and select Point. As you can see this is a bit
different from the Editor in that the layers are collapsed and a lot smaller. So I'll go ahead and right-click and rename this Point to "Motion Tracking Data". This isn't necessary but it's definitely helpful to keep your layers
organized when you're inside of a comp because you can end up having dozens and
dozens of different layers. Now what I'll do is select the clip and come over to
the Controls panel. The Controls panel will now have a few more options than we
did in the Editor. Come over here to Tracks and then select the plus icon.
We get a new window pop up which is Track, and this is how we're going to
motion track the footage. We also get a red box and a green box over here and
you can resize these by clicking the control handles in the corners. I'll come
over here and change the type to Double Points and this will give us two boxes. The reason we need two boxes is because we're tracking the rotation of the
movement as well and you can't track rotation if you just have a single point. So the red box is the feature tracking area, this is what HitFilm is actually
going to track, and the green box is where it's going to look for that red
box. With motion tracking, you need something that is visible throughout
ideally the entire scene, it doesn't have to be, there are ways around it but
technically it should be visible the entire scene and it should also be
something that has a lot of contrast, so the software can see it the whole time.
You also want to place the motion tracking boxes near the area where
you're going to put the CG object, in this case we're going to put the text in
this area here so it makes sense to track these two objects. Once I have my
boxes positioned, I'll come over and select this Track
Forwards button. HitFilm will automatically track the movement and if
it gets stuck at any point, you can restart the track. So that's it for step
one which is tracking the footage, now we need to apply it to a specific layer. Come down to layer and select the Motion Tracking Data Point that we created
earlier. You'll see that X position and Y position are already checkmarked, I'll
also go ahead and do rotation. In this case, Scale isn't necessary. Then I'll hit
apply. It might look like nothing happened but the data has been applied
to the point. If I come over here up to the Viewer, because we got switched to
the Layer panel when we motion tracked, make sure you're in the Viewer, then come
down here and select the Point. If I select that Point layer and then play
the video, you should see that it stays attached to the area on-screen. If I zoom
in, you can also see a bunch of little squares here which represent the
keyframes that the program has automatically created. If I come down
here and drop down the Transform properties, you'll also notice dozens and
dozens of keyframes for each frame of the video. This is HitFilm automatically
determining where the point should be and how it should be rotated at that
specific time. So now that we have the shot motion
tracked, we can create basically anything and then attach it to that Point in
order to make it follow the motion tracking data. In this case, what I'll do
is create a New Layer > Text, and it's very similar to text on the Editor. Then I'll
type where this is. I can come in and highlight the text and go to the Text
panel just like in the Editor and choose a font that fits, scale it up, and maybe
change the color as well to something a bit more sandy, like that. If I come over
to the selection tool, I can adjust the Position of the text, maybe move it up,
and then it won't automatically follow the motion of the camera, you have to
tell it to do that. So what I'll just do is come over here, to this window that
says "None" which is to the right of the Text layer, and then, this is called
parenting, I'll parent it to the Motion Tracking Data. This means that the Text
layer will follow whatever the Motion Tracking Data Point does, and in this
case, it will follow along with the motion of the camera. We use motion
tracking all the time in our visual effects to attach things in 2D and 3D into our scenes and we have a couple of tutorials covering that as well, so if
you're interested in learning more about the process feel free to check those out. Thanks for joining us for another HitFilm Basics video. In the next tutorial,
we're going to show you how to green screen and rotoscope to do even more
visual effects. Thanks for watching and we'll see you all in the next tutorial.
