Hey guys, thanks for joining us for another video in our HitFilm Basics
Masterclass. If you missed any of the other tutorials in this series we have
covered quite a few topics already so be sure to check out the playlist in the
description if you missed any of them. In this tutorial, we're going to take a look
at keyframing, which is how you animate things inside of HitFilm, and motion
tracking, which is how you attach elements to things in your video. Let's
take a look at this example inside of HitFilm. I've got some footage of a
forest, which maybe comes from a vlog or travel video, and I've got some text that
pops in saying where the location is, but I'm not a fan of the way this text
currently just appears. It doesn't really match the smooth camera movement that
I'm going for. So let's start with something simple and make the text fade
in. To do that what I'll do is come back over here to the beginning and I'll go
ahead and zoom in on the timeline. The thing about keyframing is that it's very
important where your timeline indicator is, so this line right here, it makes a
difference where you place the keyframes. To start I'll place it right at the
beginning of the text. I'll select the Text Layer so that it's active inside of
the Controls panel, and then I'll come over to Opacity which is the
transparency. Keyframing can be activated on any setting that has this circle to
the left of it. Right now it's turned off so I'll just
go ahead and click it once to turn it on. You can see that the outline turned
orange and this means that keyframing is now on. Now, at the beginning, I want the
opacity of the text to be zero, so I'll go ahead and turn that down until it's
invisible. Now I can either hit play or just click and drag the timeline
indicator to go ahead to where I want the text to fade in. At this point I'll
come over and just drag the slider up to 100% and you can see that on the
timeline we have a visual representation of the keyframe, it's going from 0 up to
100% over the course of this time. You don't have to click the circle every
time you want to make a keyframe, you just have to change the value that it's
representing. if you click the circle again it'll turn off and delete all of
the keyframes. Now if I play it back you can see that the text fades in nicely
and it matches the smoothness of the camera movement a bit more. If I wanted
the text to fade out after a couple of seconds I could come over here a little
bit later, giving the audience a chance to read it, and then what I'll do is
select the Opacity, and there are two ways to do this, you
can either select the number you're already on and hit enter - this will
create another keyframe, or if you select that property and then come up here,
you'll have a couple of keyframe buttons. So, in this case, Toggle Keyframe will add
a new one into the timeline, then I'll skip ahead a bit more and bring the
opacity back down to zero. You could use the controls on the timeline here but
they don't always appear for every parameter, in this case, it's just Opacity.
So now I have some text that fades in, lingers, for a second or two, and then
fades out. As I mentioned earlier, any setting that has the circle to the left
of it can be keyframed so for example I could also make the Text scale or grow
over time. If I come over here and activate keyframes for Scale I can do
something similar. So maybe I'll have it start at 40% Scale, and then over
time, grow to 80% so it'll double in size. You'll notice that we don't get
a representation of the Scale on the timeline like we do with Opacity. You can
see that the text now fades in and grows over time. You could do the same thing
for Position or Rotation, any of these keyframe-able properties. If you want to
be able to see the actual keyframes what you want to do is give yourself some
space and then select the property that you're wanting to view. In this case,
let's take a look at Opacity. Then I'll come up here to this button which will
display the keyframe timeline. We'll get another timeline, similar to the one over
here on the right, but this one will only show the keyframes. So I can zoom in and
you can see that each of the properties is displayed here. So here we have the to
Scale keyframes and down here we have the four Opacity keyframes. So if I wanted
to adjust the timing of the Scale keyframes I could do that and I could
make it slower, or if I move it over here to the left it'll make it much faster. To
demonstrate the other keyframe types I'm just going to turn off the Opacity
keyframes for a second because it'll be easier to see. So I'll remove those but
I'll leave the Scale keyframes on. These keyframes are linear which means they go
from A to B in the same amount of time. We have a couple other options as well
if you want to make things a bit smoother. So right now it's set to linear
and this is what it looks like - the text is the same size and then it grows at
the same rate the entire time. What I can do is come over here and
select these keyframes, and I can highlight both of them by clicking and
dragging, and up here we have a couple different keyframe types. So Constant,
which is the second one, means the keyframe won't interpolate, it won't grow,
it'll only snap to the next property. So if I hit play here you'll see that it's
the same size until it's not. And that will happen in a single frame there's no
growing, there's no interpolation between the two values, it just snaps to whatever
the next one is. Another example is Smooth which is a popular one. This adds
a little bit of curve to the beginning and end of the movement so that it's a
little bit more fluid and not as jerky or sudden. Then we have Smooth In and
Smooth Out which only affect one side of the keyframe. And finally, we have Manual
Bezier which is a bit more complex and we're probably not going to get into
that in this video but it allows you to adjust the value graph so you can
fine-tune the exact movement of the keyframe if you wanted to do that. Here's
another example where we have some text pop in. Maybe I want to have it slide in
from the left, then maybe do a little bump to have some animation. So what I'll
do is come over and activate keyframes for the Position property. Now I can move
this text off-screen, it doesn't matter if you alter the position of the text
after you activate keyframes, it just matters that wherever it is on that
frame, that's what the keyframe is going to be. So then I'll skip forward a little
bit and bring the text back in and maybe I'll overshoot it just a little bit from
where I actually want it to be. Then I'll skip forward a couple of frames and
bring the text back. Then this will give it a little bit of a bounce. Since we've
added motion to this Text, technically, it should be blurry. So to do that, what I'll
do is select the text and come into the clip properties, there's a section for
Motion Blur. If I checkmark that you can see that the title will automatically
blur based on the movement. This is important if you're keyframing things
like Position, Scale or rotation, where if it's moving quickly, it should also be
blurred. This is what it looks like now. Now that we've covered the basics of
keyframing, let's take a look at motion tracking. Motion tracking is used
quite often to attach things into your video. In order to begin motion tracking
inside of HitFilm Express we need to learn about composite
shots, which we haven't touched on at all yet inside of this masterclass. In
HitFilm, we've been staying on the Editor timeline, which is this main one here, and
you can have multiple clips one after another and it's how you assemble a
basic edit. A composite shot is a space where you can work on one specific clip
and add multiple layers on top of each other in order to interact and create
visual effects. Let's take a look at that now. You can create a blank composite
shot from the Media Panel under the New section. If you have a clip already in
mind, you can do that as well if you right-click on it and then select
Make Composite Shot that will work, or, if it's already on the timeline, you can
right-click again and then select Make Composite Shot. This will take us into a
new area that we've not seen before.
If you want to go back to the Editor you
can do so at any time by clicking this tab here. As I mentioned, Composite Shots
are for one specific shot so typically it'll be the exact length of the clip
that you're editing. Let's say we wanted to add some text into this clip but have
it follow the camera shake and movement to make it a bit more interesting. The
first thing about motion tracking is that you need to attach the data to a
Point. So HitFilm is going to track the motion of this clip and it needs a way
to remember all of that data and the way we're going to do that is by putting it
inside of a new Point Layer. So I'll come over here to New Layer and select
Point. As you can see this is a bit different from the Editor in that the
layers are collapsed and a lot smaller. So I'll go ahead and right-click and
rename this Point to "Motion Tracking Data". This isn't necessary but it's
definitely helpful to keep your layers organized when you're inside of a comp
because you can end up having dozens and dozens of different layers. Now what I'll
do is select the clip and come over to the Controls panel. The Controls panel
will now have a few more options than we did in the Editor. Come over here to
Tracks and then select the plus icon. We get a new window pop up which is
Track, and this is how we're going to motion track the footage. We also get a
red box and a green box over here and you can resize these by clicking the
control handles in the corners. I'll come over here and change the type to Double
Points and this will give us two boxes. The reason we need two boxes is because
we're tracking the rotation of the movement as well and you can't track
rotation if you just have a single point. So the red box is the feature tracking
area, this is what HitFilm is actually going to track, and the green box is
where it's going to look for that red box. With motion tracking, you need
something that is visible throughout ideally the entire scene, it doesn't have
to be, there are ways around it but technically it should be visible the
entire scene and it should also be something that has a lot of contrast, so
the software can see it the whole time. You also want to place the motion
tracking boxes near the area where you're going to put the CG object, in
this case we're going to put the text in this area here so it makes sense to
track these two objects. Once I have my boxes positioned,
I'll come over and select this Track Forwards button. HitFilm will
automatically track the movement and if it gets stuck at any point, you can
restart the track. So that's it for step one which is tracking the footage, now we
need to apply it to a specific layer. Come down to layer and select the Motion
Tracking Data Point that we created earlier. You'll see that X position and Y
position are already checkmarked, I'll also go ahead and do rotation. In this
case, Scale isn't necessary. Then I'll hit apply. It might look like nothing
happened but the data has been applied to the point. If I come over here up to
the Viewer, because we got switched to the Layer panel when we motion tracked,
make sure you're in the Viewer, then come down here and select the Point. If I
select that Point layer and then play the video, you should see that it stays
attached to the area on-screen. If I zoom in, you can also see a bunch of little
squares here which represent the keyframes that the program has
automatically created. If I come down here and drop down the Transform
properties, you'll also notice dozens and dozens of keyframes for each frame of
the video. This is HitFilm automatically determining where the point should be
and how it should be rotated at that specific time.
So now that we have the shot motion tracked, we can create basically anything
and then attach it to that Point in order to make it follow the motion
tracking data. In this case, what I'll do is create a New Layer > Text, and it's very
similar to text on the Editor. Then I'll type where this is. I can come in and
highlight the text and go to the Text panel just like in the Editor and choose
a font that fits, scale it up, and maybe change the color as well to something a
bit more sandy, like that. If I come over to the selection tool, I can adjust the
Position of the text, maybe move it up, and then it won't automatically follow
the motion of the camera, you have to tell it to do that. So what I'll just do
is come over here, to this window that says "None" which is to the right of the
Text layer, and then, this is called parenting, I'll parent it to the Motion
Tracking Data. This means that the Text layer will follow whatever the Motion
Tracking Data Point does, and in this case, it will follow along with the
motion of the camera. We use motion tracking all the time in our visual
effects to attach things in 2D and 3D into our scenes and we have a couple of
tutorials covering that as well, so if you're interested in learning more about
the process feel free to check those out. Thanks for joining us for another HitFilm
Basics video. In the next tutorial, we're going to show you how to green
screen and rotoscope to do even more visual effects. Thanks for watching and
we'll see you all in the next tutorial.