Hey, I’m Axel, and in this tutorial we are going to look at using HitFilm to create the
on-screen title for our short film Rebellion. For your own projects, you may want to use
the text tools in HitFilm to create a title from scratch, or perhaps import a title graphic
to use in the software. So we will look at both options. Let’s open HitFilm and see
how easy it is. So here we are in HitFilm Express, but of
course you can use the Pro version of HitFilm too, if you have it. To create our title,
the first step is to create a composite shot. HitFilm has two types of timelines, The Editor
timeline, where you sequence your clips, and composite shots, where we generate effects,
create animation, or make titles. So in the Media panel, select New > Composite shot.
Let’s name it Title, set its duration to 5 seconds, and we will use a resolution of
1920 x 1080. Then, let’s select the Text tool and drag a box on the viewer. Drag it
the same width as the viewer, and about a third of the height. You can also change the
layout of the software so its easier to work on your composite shot, through the View menu.
If you are on Windows, this option is in the Workspaces menu, which looks like this:
Now let’s type in the title, REBELLION, enter, A HITFILM™ Story. You can type the
trademark symbol by pressing Option+2 on the Mac, or on Windows, hit the number lock key,
then hold Alt, and type 0153 on the keypad. Once the text is typed in, we can adjust the
formatting. If you don’t have the fonts I use here, you can either download and install
them on your system, or just choose other fonts. Select all the text, and center it,
then set the Font to Trajan. For the top line, set the size to 200. I’m going to leave
the bottom line at 48 point, but select HITFILM™ and change the font to Lato, and make it Bold.
Then let’s increase the line spacing a bit for the bottom line, to 80. If the edges of
the text look a bit rough, make sure your Viewer quality is set to Antialiased.
Next, we want to add color this text. You can use the color picker in the Text panel,
and apply any color you want to the text, but instead, let’s use a gradient which
is more interesting. Open the Effects panel, then open the Gradients & Fills folder, and
find the Radial Gradient. Drag the effect onto the Text layer, this is how you can add
effects to any layer in HitFilm. Double-click the effect, and we can customize its controls.
Open the Inner Radius and change the color to 190, 177, 147. Open the Outer Radius, and
set the color to 86, 77, 46. If you want to use different colors, please do, you can click
the color swatch to open a color picker. Then set the Outer Radius Opacity to 1.00, and
increase the Radius to 600 or so, until it fills the width of the title.
The last step of this title will be adding some animation. Nearly any aspect of your
work in HitFilm can be changed over time very simply, using keyframes. We will use keyframes
to animate the scale of our text. Open the Transform controls for this layer, and find
the Scale property. Just left of the property, the circle is the Keyframe toggle. Click the
circle to turn keyframes on, and the current value is saved in a keyframe on the frame
where the playhead is located. On the timeline, you will see a small diamond representing
the keyframe. Now advance to the end of the timeline, and change the Scale to 90. A second
keyframe is created, storing that value, and now HitFilm will automatically calculate the
values for all the frames in between, so the title changes from one value to the other.
We have just created animation, and we can use this same process to create animation
on any property. You could animate the color in the Gradient effect, or the position of
the text, using the same keyframing technique. In some cases, though, you may prefer to create
a title in a graphics editor, rather than creating it in HitFilm. The eye next to each
layer controls its visibility. Click it to hide our text layer, then drag the Rebellion-Logo-1080p.png
image from the Media panel onto the timeline. To add color to this image, we will again
use a gradient. We could repeat the steps we used before to apply and set up the gradient,
but instead, let’s just copy the effect we already dialed in. On the Text layer, right-click
the Radial Gradient, and select Copy. Then right-click on the image layer and Paste.
This layer is a bit larger than the text, so we need to adjust the size of the Radial
Gradient to match it. You can edit the controls of a layer or effect at any time. Open the
Outer Radius for the gradient and increase the Radius to 1000. Then we want to reduce
the scale of this whole image to 70% so its closer to what the text was. Then let’s
animate the Scale again. Do you remember how? Click the circle to enable keyframing. Advance
to the end of the timeline, then reduce the scale, to 60. And there you go.
We aren’t going to get into how to create the starfield background in this video, but
if you want, open the Finished Title timeline, right-click on the Starfield layer, and Copy
it. Then switch back to our Title composite shot, and right-click and paste the layer,
then drag its name below the other layers to place it behind the logo.
Whether you want to use the built-in text feature, or import an image made elsewhere,
you can quickly and easily create great titles in HitFilm. Try experimenting on your own,
perhaps using Keyframes to animate the Opacity of the title, and please do click through
to the other tutorials on our channel to learn more about using HitFilm.