Review: FXhome HitFilm Pro

Then I chose Transform, because there are two options. You can either stabilize a clip or transform. Transform will allow you to apply the tracker to an object and then have it make that object move with the tracker. Then I right-clicked in this menu and added a new point, and then I chose that new point as the layer for it to apply to. I did not need rotation or scale, really, for this effect, because of the nature of the motion of this clip. I probably could have used scale as the dog gets closer to make that supernova grow a little bit, but it's so subtle, I didn't really worry about it and didn't feel like it made much of a difference.

Then you would apply this to that new point, and then you drill down into this new point, boom. There's all those tracking points, key-framed along the position as the dog moves through the clip, and then finally, going back to the light flare, turning it on, and then choosing a preset of what you want it to look like, and then choosing under the motion, the position, you would choose it to follow that new point. This is like parenting in After Effects. Then if you look under the Viewer, that little supernova follows his eye perfectly smoothly, as shown in the video. If I go back to my editor now and go back to that clip, you can see he has the supernova, but also he has the laser beams, and he can have laser beam eyes, plus a supernova coming out of his forehead.

The last thing that I typically do in this project is, I add some color, because the grade from the camera is very dull and flat, so you should definitely add some color back in, some contrast. I used a number of effects, again, just available within HitFilm's effects, including, on this one clip, the witness protection, but then on most clips, I just chose a look that looked good by using a combination of these, and then I was able to copy the effect by right-clicking on the clip, hitting Copy. This sounds a little counterintuitive, but you copy the clip, and then you go to another clip, right-click, and you want to paste attributes.

When you copy, it copies the clip and the attributes, but then when you paste, you can choose whether to paste the clip itself or just the attributes, so this would copy all of the effects from one to the other, so I was able to just apply the grade I wanted to the first clip, select everything after it except for the rain, and then I was able to paste the attributes on top of that to get the grade across all the clips at once. It made it very quick and easy.

Then there's one more troublesome clip that I always deal with, which is this one here, because the camera was wobbling around on a platform high above this waterfall, and this is where I used the tracker to stabilize. My tracker was put on two points again. I chose two points on rocks that really don't move around at all, and there's not a lot of water flowing over them to move to trick the tracker into following it off the edge here, and it did a great job, again, of following it. You don't see much of a movement because of the fact that it doesn't move like the animal did in the other shot. If I zoom in, there's just a tight cluster of motion frames where it moves around a little bit, and again, going to the Viewer, it does a tremendous job of keeping that clip much more stable than it was originally.

Exporting a Video

Of course, your final step is getting your video out into the world, so you would go to the Export tab. You can see all your presets on the right in Figure 12 (below). If you don't find something you like here, you actually have to make your own preset. You can't just choose a preset and then customize it, so if you do that, you'll find all the parameters that you would typically need, including being able to adjust your bitrate and the number of passes that it takes.

Figure 12. In HitFilm, you either choose an export preset or create your own.

To export your project, you would go back to your Editing tab. Then you go down here to the bottom left and choose to either export the contents, which would be your entire timeline, or just export the in and out points, which, again, would only export this lighter gray area here, but I want the whole timeline, so I'll choose Export Contents (Figure 13, below). You would choose your destination, of course, wherever you want the file to go, name it, choose your preset here, which I'll go with YouTube, 1080p, and then start your export by clicking Start (Figure 14, below Figure 13).

Figure 13. Choosing Export Contents

Figure 14. Setting up your Export

That's a look at HitFilm Pro, which is another alternative that you can use over Premiere Pro. There is a free version available which is limited in its capabilities, but HitFilm Pro gives you pretty much everything you're going to need for a day-to-day, nonlinear editor.