HitFilm 4 Pro is out right now!
It’s the best version we’ve ever made,
and there’s way too much to talk about in just one video.
If you’re totally new to HitFilm, head over to hitfilm.com where you’ll find all the
details. This video is going to talk about some of the new stuff.
Here’s a shelf with a skull on it. There’s
a bunch of cool stuff going on here which is entirely new to HitFilm 4 Pro. Let’s
pick it apart. OK, here’s what I started with. A high detail
3D scan of a human skull. For the background I’m just using a couple of basic 3D planes
- nothing fancy. If I jump out to perspective view you can see how simple the scene actually
is. So in previous versions of HitFilm we used
a Phong lighting model, which is great for some materials like plastics. In HitFilm 4
Pro we’ve added the Cook-Torrance model, which is more suited to metals and rougher
surfaces. Cook Torrance lets you pick from a bunch of
different metallic surfaces, and for this skull I decided to make it out of copper.
You can adjust how the surface reacts to light in the model’s materials properties.
Let’s talk about another major feature. Here we have the skull lit by a single light.
It looks cool, but now I’m going to turn on the new reflections feature. You can see
now that the skull is receiving diffused, ambient blue bounce light from the back wall.
To illustrate what’s going on here, let’s go into the wall’s properties, where you
can see its colour is set by the Fill effect. If I open up the color palette and switch
to a different color, such as this red, you can see that the skull updates to the new
colour. This is all thanks to the new real time reflections.
A huge benefit is in this diffused lighting, whereby 3D models can receive bounced light
from nearby objects. It massively boosts the realism of your shots by creating a more naturalistic
appearance. If I add a 4-point gradient to the floor, you can see the skull take on all
those additional colours. It’s all real time, so as I move tje light around the lighting
on the skull changes depending on which parts of the wall and floor are most illuminated.
This has pretty massive implications when you think about trying to composite a 3D model
into a live action video. Now, you can set it up so that the model receives its lighting
from its surroundings, not just from your actual 3D lights. It makes everything look
better without needing any extra work on your part.
Obviously this is also super great for vehicles, spaceships, weapons, anything like that. There’s
a lot more detail on this in the updated user guide and I’m sure we’re going to be coming
back to these features to look at them in more detail in videos later on in the year.
Moving on,I’ve also got this moody smoke inside the skull. This kind of thing has always
been really, really easy in HitFilm. There’s no faffing about with fiddly compositing tricks,
because 3D models and 3D particles all exist in the same unified space. You just put the
smoke inside the skull, and you’re done. Kind of how it should always be, right?
Except, in HitFilm 4 Pro we’ve added the ability to soften intersections between particles
and 3D models, and that’s why this smoke looks so natural. I’m going to temporarily
turn off soft particles to show you the difference. OK, check out the banding going on around
the surfaces. This is happening because the smoke is made up of 2D textures. Ordinarily
it’s difficult to identify individual textures in a smoke cloud, but as soon as they come
into contact with something else, like the skull, it becomes really obvious.
Now keep an eye on the banding around the forehead of the skull as I start to ramp up
the soft particles feature. The intersections gradually soften until you can’t see them
anymore. This is an essential feature for any time you want to have a 3D model moving
through a cluster of particles. Here’s a shot of a spaceship landing. The
new soft particles make it easy to have a ton of dust fly up around the ship without
revealing those texture seams. No matter where you put the camera, you know it’s going
to be good. So I’d love to talk about how you can now
import Alembic files which support animation, so you can have a pre-baked animation which
you’ve created in 3D Studio Max or something like that, which you can then have that animation
directly inside HitFilm… ...love to talk about that but I’ve gotta
move on and talk about the new grid emitters for the particle simulator.
The particle simulator has always been a chaotic system, by design. Particles spawn randomly
in a defined area, and you can influence them using forces and deflectors. Great for atmospherics
and natural stuff. But sometimes you want something a bit more regimented. Maybe you
want to use the particle system for some motion graphics purposes. That’s where the new
grid emitters come in. Here’s a city block. And here’s a whole
city. Arranging 3D objects into regimented patterns like this is now really easy, and
you know that none of the particles will overlap because they’re being spawned based on a
defined grid pattern. Or if you take an abstract 3D model that’s
kinda spiky you can suddenly create interesting snowflake and ice sculptures.
You motion graphics artists out there are going absolutely love the grid emitters. You’re
also going to love is the fact that 3D Objects from Boris FX is included with every copy
of HitFilm 4 Pro. So that’s a $299 plugin which is just included with HitFilm 4 Pro
now. It delivers full control over your text, throws
in advanced extrusion and bevelling, puts it all in 3D and adds some really interesting
built-in 3D distortion and animation tricks. Of course you’re also get mocha HitFilm
from Imagineer Systems for all your planar tracking needs. That’s actually been upgraded
a bit as well so you can now use it to create corner pinning data, which is really useful.
You also still get over 140 HitFilm effects as plugins because we like making all your
other software better. So you can use a load of HitFilm stuff inside Premiere, DaVinci
Resolve, Final Cut Pro, and Sony Catalyst. So I’ve not been able to cover everything
in this video. I’ve not even got into the new spatial interpolation controls on the
viewer or the animation value graph, which completely transforms the kind of animation
you can do in the software. I’ve not talked about the new audio effects, especially the
doppler effect, where you can actually assign a sound effect to a 3D object which is flying
around in your scene, and it’ll add doppler shift to it automatically.
Also the hitfilm editor has been upgraded so we now have proper JKL playback, both reverse
and forwards, so the editors among you are going to love that. We have a new rate stretch
tool so you can adjust your layers’ and clips’ playback speed really easily.
OK, so that’s HitFilm 4 Pro. I’m sure you’ve got loads of questions, so do ask
in the comments on this YouTube video or head over to the forum. Wherever you ask them we’ll
be keeping an eye and answering everything that we possibly can. OK, many thanks for
watching and I’ll see you in a couple of weeks.