Hello, I’m Axel, back with another HitFilm tutorial.
Our house is progressing nicely.
We still don't have any furniture or appliances, I still haven't found my Lav mic but it's
getting close.
In this tutorial we are going to look at the new Layout Panel that was introduced in HitFilm
Pro 8.
The Layout Panel dramatically speeds up positioning and alignment tasks, and is a powerful tool
for motion graphics work.
We're not creating a specific end result in this tutorial, so you don’t really need
a project file to follow along.
You can use whatever images or videos you prefer, or even create a few small planes
to work with to try out these tools yourself.
The Layout panel can be opened at any time from the Workspaces menu, like any panel,
but the Compositing workspace includes it by default.
You can lay things out in the Editor timeline as well, but we will use a comp in this case.
The layout panel has two sections: The top half of the panel includes Transform controls,
for precisely positioning your selections.
The bottom half has controls for aligning the selection and distributing multiple layers.
At the very top are four buttons, which let you instantly flip, flop or rotate the selection.
I have four logo images imported here, so if we select one of these logos, we can mirror
it vertically, horizontally, or rotate it in either direction.
At the top left of the Layout Panel is the control point selection, and to the right
are the absolute values for the selected control point.
When you select a layer, a bounding box appears around its edges, and control point selection
corresponds to that.
You can click any of these points to set that corner, or that side of the bounding box as
the anchor point from which the layer will be adjusted.
By default a layer’s anchor point is in the center, and if you change its scale, it
adjusts in all directions from the center.
But if we click another point, say the top left corner, then the scale change occurs
from that point.
The anchor point stays fixed in place, and the rest of the selection transforms from
it.
So if we have aligned the layer to one edge already, this means we can change the scale
of the layer without throwing off that alignment.
When you select multiple layers, there isn’t a visible bounding box on the viewer surrounding
them all, but the Layout controls still operate based on a bounding box that defines the overall
size of the entire selection.
You can change the values to place the selection in any specific position, with total accuracy,
or control its size in exact pixel dimensions.
The normal Scale control, in the transform controls for the layer, uses a percentage
of the original size, which is sometimes useful but if you need the selection to be exactly
560 pixels wide, then you probably don’t care what percentage of the original size
that might be.
Here, you can just enter the size you want, and be done.
The width and height are linked by default, but you can unlink them if necessary.
The lower half of the Layout panel contains the Alignment and Distribution controls, which
allow you to very quickly reposition your selection.
Align To can instantly reposition the selected layers within the selection, or the timeline.
If you have a single layer selected, Align To Timeline will be the most useful.
You can click any of the icons to move the layer in relation to the timeline’s size,
positioning it horizontally in the center or on either edge of the timeline, or vertically
in the center or at the top or bottom.
When you have multiple layers selected, Align To Timeline will move all of the selected
layers at once, to the alignment you choose, but you can also choose Align To Selection.
The software creates an invisible bounding box based on the outermost edges of the selection,
as we mentioned earlier, and you can move the layers within that bounding box.
So if we have all four logos selected, and we alight them right, they all line up with
the logo that was furthest to the right.
When you want to evenly space multiple objects, the Distribute controls really speed things
up.
It is so much faster than manually positioning each layer.
If we want to evenly space these four logos across the center of the viewer, for example,
we can select them, set Align To Timeline, and click the horizontal center button to
line them all up.
Select the logo you want to be on the right, and align it to the edge.
Align another logo to the left edge.
Then select all four, and Distribute Horizontally, to perfectly space them out across the viewer.
And it works the same whether you have three layers selected, or 50.
It very quickly creates perfectly even spacing.
The other two buttons distribute the layers based on their edges.
Right now it might not be obvious what they do, because all of the layers are basically
the same size, so we have only one logo that wiggles a bit when we change these options.
But if we select one of these logos and change its size, then we see the different alignment
created by each of these options.
This button uses the left edge of each layer, and evenly spaces those edges, rather than
the centers.
We can also evenly space the centers, as we did to begin with, or the right edges of the
individual layers.
So, those are the basics of how the layout panel works.
We are sure you will find it exceedingly useful, and once you get familiar with it, you‘ll
wonder how you ever got along without it.
That’s it for today, thanks for watching, please subscribe and hit the Bell icon to
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