Wow, look at that.
That looks pretty hot.
I’m really feeling it here.
You could fry an egg on that car.
That girl needs some sun protection.
She really picked the wrong month to go on a rebellious anti-authoritarian rampage across
South Dakota.
Oh, no, wait.
It’s a rainy day in Norfolk, England.
My mistake.
I’m Simon Jones from HitFilm.com, and this tutorial is all about heat distortion, one
of the new effects in HitFilm 3 Pro.
Here’s another example of heat distortion in action.
Check out the distortion around the fire on this crashed chopper.
This is a slightly more extreme application of the effect.
So, let’s take a closer look at our hot tarmac shot.
On top of everything, there’s some film grain, to give it a slightly more retro feel.
You almost certainly won’t be able to see that thanks to the video compression on this
tutorial, but trust me - it’s there.
I then have some anamorphic lens flare action coming done from on high.
That adds to the impression of the sun being super intense somewhere overhead, despite
the overwhelmingly cloudy sky.
Then there’s the layer with the heat distortion.
While it’s set up to be relatively subtle in this shot, you can see just how big a difference
it’s making when I turn it off.
I’ve then got this light flare casting some rays down from the top of frame, again to
give the viewer the impression of the sun being burning hot just out of shot.
On the video layer itself I have three effects.
Color vibrance is creating that superhot, intense, orange look.
I tend to use color vibrance to give intense color to greyscale, generated elements, such
as planets and stars and particle sparks, but it can be pretty effective on live action
footage too.
I’ve used Leave Color to isolate and remove most of the green from the grass.
I wanted the whole shot to look burnt and scorched, so this was a quick way to get rid
of the healthy grass.
This was a simple matter of selecting the colour, inverting it and then blending it
back onto the original.
Finally there’s a Kodachrome LUT applied to give the shot its overall look.
In this tutorial I’m only going to focus on the heat distortion itself.
So let’s take a look.
First I’ll select my heat distortion layer and delete it, so I can start from scratch.
For the distortion I created a new grade layer, from the New Layer menu.
Grade layers are special because they affect all layers below them.
It’s a handy way to quickly adjust multiple layers at the same time.
The default settings for heat distortion are pretty intense.
If I drag on the effect from the effects panel, you can see that the entire frame is affected.
That’s because the grade layer is covering the entire frame.
The easy way to customise the affected areas is using masks.
First I’ll select the layer, then the rectangle tool in the Viewer, and will draw a shape
over the lower third of that shot.
This restricts the heat distortion to that area.
In the mask’s shape properties I’ll ramp the feather strength all the way up to give
it a nice soft edge.
However, there’s still too much distortion on our actors and the vehicle.
To counter this I’ll add a second mask.
This one I’ll draw over the vehicle.
I’ll switch the mask’s blend mode to Subtract, which will remove that area from the previous
selection.
I’ll also ramp the feather strength way up again.
The heat distortion is now limited to the area I want, but it’s pretty extreme still.
This kind of distortion would be great for a jet engine, but for natural heat haze it’s
a bit much.
Heat distortion can be fully customised.
There are two key parts to the effect - the displacement on the background, and then an
additional localised, moving diffusion, or blur.
You can adjust the strength of these two elements separately - I’ll drop distortion and diffusion
strength both down to 25.
This makes for less distortion.
The distortion is still moving pretty fast, though.
We want a slower, subtler animation.
In the animation controls I’ll drop wind speed to 25 and noise speed down to 0.5.
You can further customise the generation of the noise pattern, which is used to create
the undulating distortion, if you want.
This kind of heat distortion was possible before, but you would have needed to create
your own noise pattern, perhaps using particle effects or fractal effects, put that into
its own composite shot and then applied displacement and blurring separately.
The big benefit of the heat distortion effect is that you get the same result more-or-less
instantly, while still having a fine degree of control.
Many thanks for watching this tutorial.
Head over to HitFilm.com or our YouTube channel for even more.