Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hello, my name is Uwais and I am a lover of movies and filmmaking and everything that concerns it. I run a channel on YouTube called Red Alert in which I teach filmmaking as well as video effects and video editing, all the way from preproduction to postproduction. I've been making videos, tutorials, short films, and teaching video editing on YouTube for around six years now. After having taught myself everything that I know, it dawned on me the world of business and entertainment is changing, especially in recent times the way everything is moved online, being able to edit a video together in a fun comprehensive and professional way is a necessary skill to have and it's just really fun. A lot of people don't know the basics of this craft that I love so dearly and that's what we'll be focusing on in this course. Over the course of this course, if you decide to embark on this journey with me, we'll be going over the basic tools of any editing program. For the purpose of this course, I've chosen to work in a program called Hitfilm Express. The reason I've chosen this is because it's a very comprehensive program that is 100 percent free to download. The tools in this program are not only effective, but also very similar to all the other tools in most other editing programs such as Final Cut Pro, Premier Pro, Sony Vegas Pro, etc. So in that way you can follow along with this course and take part in a class project using the editing program of your choice. Although if you are a beginner and this is your first time editing, you don't really want to spend money on a program, I would recommend Hitfilm Express, as I said it's 100 percent free and very intuitive, and easy to follow along. We'll be taking a look at the various tools you'll need to make basic edits, how to sync together your first sequence, add music, text, and sound effects, as well as a light touch of color work to give your video that pro look. We'll then also cover the exciting export process in which you produce your first ever video project. If this sounds intriguing to you and you want to add yet another skill to your technological arsenal that'll help you in life, business, school, as well as starting your video on YouTube channel, hop along to the next episode and let's get started.
2. Setup & Overview: Hey there. Glad to see you just try to stick around. Let's get editing. As I mentioned in my program of choices HitFilm Express because it is free after all, and if you're new, it's a great way to start out. The beginning process of any video edit, it starts off with setting up your project with any actual editing software. Now, this is the one part that may differ a little bit based on the software that you are using. But if we take a look over here, what HitFilm is showing us, this is the latest version of HitFilm and essentially they are asking us to select a different template. Now, this essentially just needs to match the footage that you are recording. Usually, cameras record around 24 or 25 frames per second depending on your location and region in the world. If you're using a cell phone, which I would suggest is a good way to start out, it's usually at around 25 frames per second on, for example, iPhone. For example, the footage that I'm using in this course, and it's also available for you to download if you want to mess around with that and not use your own footage in the project tab down below. It's shot at full HD, which is 1080p and 25 frames per second. I'm just going to select that in the Drop-down menu. The duration you don't really have to worry about because as you add clips into your timeline, it will increase it automatically, then with everything else will remain the same and we just hit "Okay". Immediately we're presented with is really intimidating screen with a bunch of windows all that on. But don't panic, it's extremely simple once we start breaking down what these different panels do. Let's do a quick walk-through overview of all the different panels in the software. Again, it will be similar to most other editing programs out there. Over here in the top right-hand corner, we'll see the Viewer panel, essentially think of this as a window. Essentially it will show you anything that you are busy editing in the editor. Now if we talk about the editor, is the tab down here. This window called the Editor is your timeline of events. If you place a clip in the editor and another clip after it, that's the sequence in which it will appear in your final video. To see what you're actually doing in the editor is displayed in the viewer. I hope they started to make a bit more sense. Think of the timeline or the editor window down below as a way to organize all of your clips, trim off parts that you don't want, and actually make the specific edits that we'll be doing in this course. The viewer is the actual window that shows you what you are actually doing in the editor. Moving on over here onto the left-hand side, we'll see an array of different panels starting out with the Media panel. The Media panel is essentially the area that will store all of your videos, pictures, music files, sound effects, and anything that you are going to be putting into your final project. It will be here, and by clicking this button, the Import button, you bring those files into the software and it's stored here. Think of it almost as if it's a locker storing all of the equipment or files that you'll be using to assemble in the video editor and which you will be seeing in the viewer window. Next step, if we go to the next tab, you'll see it's the Effects tab. Now, this is basically just exactly what it says. It houses all of the software's different effects in their respective folders in different categories, which you can click the effect and then hold and drag it onto a clip, which we'll talk about later on. Moving on, we have the Controls panel. This currently doesn't display anything because we don't have a clip selected. Essentially, the Controls panel will house all of the different settings for the clip, including the size of the clip, the position of the video, maybe the volume of the video, and also all of the controls or sittings regarding the effects that we just talked about earlier. Once you actually have a video file inside of your timeline, be it a audio file, a video file, a picture, and you have it selected in your actual editor tab, the clip settings will appear in the controls panel. I'm not really going to discuss the History tab as well as the Text tab because, for the purposes of this video, which is just an overview. Later on in the course, we'll be talking about actually adding text to your video. Finally, up here we have the Trimmer tab. Now, the Trimmer tab is extremely useful because once you have a clip inside of your Media panel, you click it, it will then appear in the trimmer window. Think of a trimmer window as a bunch of scissors that allows you to cut out pieces of your actual video before you add it into the editor. That's just a rough overview of all of the different windows and panels in the software, as well as the way that it all functions. I hope it's starting to make a bit more sense, but it will make a lot more sense in the following episodes where we begin to actually use these panels.
3. Basic Tools: Let's do a quick overview of the different tools that you'll be using to assemble your first ever edit in this program. There's a multitude of tools available for you to use, but as a beginner, I want you to focus on two specific tools that are going to be the most used, especially when creating your first sequence. That'll be the selection tool as well as the slice tool. The selection tool can be found over here in the mini toolbar in the editor tab, and think of the selection tool as your mouse cursor. You use it to do almost everything that doesn't have a specific use with another tool. That'll be inserting clips, dragging clips around, changing the volume. Things we will be discussing and learning about in the following episode. The slice tool looks like a little razor blade and it's found right underneath the selection tool. This tool is your cutting tool. You would use it to hover over a clip and make a cut, and make another cut, and then delete that middle portion. I known it sounds like a lot, but in the next episode, we'll be actually using these tools and showing you how it actually works. Think of the slice tool as a way to make a cut in your clip. Imagine your clip was a physical tangible thing, you'd snip it and cut out a specific piece of it. This is used in order to discard pieces of your clip that you don't really need, for example, maybe you are doing stand-up like this and I'm looking at the script over there, I'm going to I cut that out. Maybe I am taking a pause to think about what I want to say, I'll cut that out also, and I do that using the razor tool. Join me in the next episode, and we will import some media and get started on editing our first-ever sequence.
4. Importing Media: Welcome to Importing Media. To begin editing our first-ever sequence, we need to actually have some things to actually start editing with. If we navigate over here to the Import button and click it, it'll launch a mini file browser. Over here, we can navigate to the specific folder in which our video files and anything that we want to edit is located in. For example, mine has opened directly up into the Project Files, because I was testing it out before hand. What I'm going to do is select, Drag a Window over all of these files since I want to be using these to edit with, and then I will click "Open" and immediately it will bring all of these clips into the actual software. As you can see, automatically something has appeared in the Trimmer Window. Whatever clip you have essentially selected in the Media Panel, that's what shows up in a Trimmer Window. If I select this bottom clip, it shows up in the Trimmer Window, now, as I mentioned previously, we're going to be using the Trimmer Window to do exactly that. Trim off sections of a video that we don't necessarily want to use, before we put it into the actual editor timeline. Let's start off by bringing out our first clip into the actual editor and trimming it off in the Trimmer panel. Let's select number one, which is the clip that I want to actually start editing with. As you can see over here, if we click the Play button and play through it, there's a bit of a portion here where I'm sitting up, I'm wiping my face down, I'm getting ready to start speaking, and there, I just started speaking over there, around six seconds or so. Obviously, all of this portion over here is dead space, it's things that we don't really want to include in our final product. How do we get rid of that? Well, first of all, let's come to the point just before I start speaking and we're going to use this little scrubber ball thing over here, in order to do so. So let's move along, yeah, I stopped speaking. Now, there's a cool little tool over here, just next to the Play button, which is called a Frame Forward Tool. This allows you to skip one flame forward in time. This allows you to get a precision cut and trim to the specific point before you start speaking, instead of guesstimating it. This is something that a lot of amateurs and people get wrong, that's really easy to fix, because sometimes you'll see there's a bit too much space before someone starts speaking, when it could have easily been gotten rid of if you use the Frame Tool. Let's click it multiple times and just go frame by frame until here. I'm about to start speaking over here. How do we get rid of all of the space before it? Essentially, what we need to do is click this tool over here, which is called the Set In Point. What this does, it tells the software to start the clip at that specific point that the cursor is at. So let's click it, and immediately, all of this other dead space beforehand has become de-selected. Now, you can repeat this process and go towards the end of your clip and click this button over here, which is the Set Out clip, but for the purposes of this tutorial and this episode, I'm just going to use the Set In Clip and I'm going make my other adjustments to trim off the end part, which also has dead space later on in the actual editor timeline. How do we get this clip firmly trimmer into the editor timeline? Well, it's really simple. We hover over the clip, we click and hold and then drag it into our clip, and as you can see, it has this snapping motion, which snaps to the cursor. In this case, we wanted to start right at the beginning of the timeline, so we'll drag it until it snaps to the start and let go and boom, we've inserted our first-ever clip into the editor timeline.
5. The Jump Cut: We have successfully selected our first clip, trimmed off the beginning portion, and inserted it into the timeline. Let's make a beginner intro-level edit. What we're going to do now is create something called a jump cut. Now, this essentially is an easy way in order to remove mistakes from your actual video because I, like everybody else and like you, are human. We make mistakes when we're speaking and we don't necessarily want to keep that mistake in the actual video. For example, let's say that we're scrubbing along and we notice boom, right over here there is a mistake. We want to cut out the specific portion, but this part at the back here we still want to keep, so there's a middle piece over here that we need to get rid of. The way in order we're going to do that is we're going to be using what I was just hovering with, which is what we talked about earlier, the slice tool. Let's head over here to the tools panel and select the slice tool. Then let's move our point over here onto the section where we want to cut it. Now essentially I want you to make sure that you have the specific point, and again, we can use the frame tools over here to go frame by frame to make sure that we are at the specific point that we want the clip to stop. With the slice tool, let's head over here, and as you can see, the software illuminates the cursor at that point. We'll click and boom, it's made a cut. Essentially what we've done now is broken that original video file into two separate video files. We can then move along a bit further, and to get a better view let's use this bar over here which we can just zoom in. Essentially it stretches the timeline zooming in so we can have a clearer view of what we are doing. Then let's say, for example, over here where my mouth is nice and wide open, let's go a bit back using the frame tool. Let's say over here I want my clip to start again, and all of this after the cut is junk, and we don't want to use it because I've been making mistakes over there and I want to discard it. Let's make another cut again. Hovering over, it turns red, we click, and it makes another cut. We'll then go back and select the selection tool because remember what I said, in order to select clips, delete them, move them around, you use the selection tool. Let's click the selection tool, and then we'll click this middle clip that we've created that contains all of the nonsense that we don't want to keep, and we'll just click the Delete key on our keyboard, and boom, it's gone. Now, essentially the problem we have here is that we have our clip playing. As we can see, it plays all nice and then suddenly there's a black space happening, and nothing's happening for a while, and then boom, the next clip starts. To get rid of that is really simple. Again, staying with the selection tool, just select the clip at the back and drag it up until it snaps into place, boom, snap, against the other clip, and boom. Now if we play through, what we'll see is that we've essentially created a jump cut. This is extremely useful, as I said, for cutting out bits in which you don't want in your video, in your short form, in your promotional video, in which you make mistakes. Maybe you're taking a break to check the script on the side, something like that. You cut it out like this and create a jump cut.
6. Adding Images (Multi Track Editing): Now that we know how to cut, we know how to import, we know how to assemble a mini-sequence, let's continue and build out the sequence a little bit more starting with trimming off the end of this specific clip that I'm on here. We import this clip in the previous video. We created a nice [inaudible] cut. Essentially, what we have at the end of the clip if we scrub here to the end, we have a portion of it where I stop speaking and look at the camera, and then I'm looking down at the script. Now, obviously, like we said earlier, we don't want this. We've covered two ways in how to remove this. We either use the Trimmer panel before we even put it into the editor, and then remove it there. We use the Slice tool like we used in the previous episode or we can do this alternate method which works if you want to cut out the end or start of a clip. We'll do that. It's very simple. We essentially will hover and move along to the point where I stop speaking. Again, let's use the frame by frame tools. Here, I close my mouth. I finally stop speaking. Finally, very hard for me to do that. Then, we'll just go to the end of the clip, and as you can see, this green icon appears and we just drag it until it snaps in with the cursor; we've essentially just cut off into the clip. This is a really simple way to trim clips after we insert it into the editor. If you don't want to do it in the trimmer panel, it's up to you which you prefer to actually do. Let's start building out this sequence by adding in another video. Let's locate the second video over here in the Media panel, and then we'll just drag it straight into the timeline and use this new method of cutting and taking out pieces that we don't want that we just did. Let's drag it right in until it snaps into place, attach to the end of our other clip, and let go. We now have a second video, but there's a piece of it before I start speaking that we obviously want to get rid of. Let's use the frame-by-frame tools and move until just before where I look at the camera. Boom. I started speaking over here. Let's go to the end. The green icon will appear. We'll then drag it until it meets the cursor. Let go. Essentially, we've just cut off the end. Again, we want to get rid of this little black space we have here. What did we learn in the previous one? We select the clip, we drag it until it snaps into place on the end of the previous clip. Let go and boom. We've eliminated the black space. We can then do the same for the end of the video. Let's move along until the end, frame by frame. Here, I've stopped speaking. Let's then go to the end, trim it off, and [inaudible]. Now, what we want to do is let's say I'm talking about a car and we want to superimpose an image of a car on top of the video for a few frames to better elaborate when we're speaking about it. The reason we do this is because it allows your audience to not be bored. If you're just watching one video of one guy talking the entire time, it gets a bit boring. As you can see in this actual course, I'm cutting between myself speaking, as well as the video capture of the editing program to better illustrate what I'm talking about. For interest sake, let's say that I'm talking about a car at this portion of the video. What we're going to do like we did earlier is we imported an actual image of an Audi Q8, a stunning vehicle, might I say. We want to actually put this into our timeline and superimpose it on top of our video. Now, HitFilm, like in many other programs, is something called a multi-track editor. Now, this is going to be fancy word in order to say that allows you to have multiple videos on top of each other, displaying multiple videos at the same time. It's really easy to do this. Obviously, with a picture, there's nothing to trim off, so the Trimmer panel is essentially useless. What I'm going to do is just click it and drag it, and instead of putting it in our main timeline over here, if we were to drop it over here, it essentially would place it right over our video and take over that portion of our video. We don't want that because we want them to simultaneously appear. Instead, let's go up a layer and drop it over here. Essentially, what HitFilm has automatically done now is create Video 2, which is another video track. As you can see over here, we have the car taking up the entire screen. The reason for this is because the car image is slightly too big, but if we manage to somehow decrease the size of this car image, we would see our original video underneath, and that's the beauty of a multi-track editor because we can have multiple videos, and audio files present, and playing at the same time. In order to decrease the size of this actual picture, let's use the Controls tab that we talked about in the first or second episode. Over here in the Media panel, let's click on these arrows and then, we'll click the "Controls" tab. Also going to decrease the size of this Editor tab. I can make it a little bigger so we can see what we're actually doing. In the Controls tab, like I said, if you have nothing selected, the Controls tab won't show anything. But if we have our core clip selected or our core picture selected, it will display the properties of that specific clip that's selected. Let's click the toggle here and reveal the "Transform" properties. Here, we have a bunch of different ones: we have Position, Scale, Rotation, and Opacity. For the purposes of this, we're going to be using the Position as well as the Scale controls. We just play here and decrease the scale. We can see that the size of the car begins to decrease, which is good. Let's decrease it until we're happy with it. That looks good to me. Then the position, if we control this one and we just slide this one, it moves it left and right, and if we move this one, it moves it up and down, sort of the X and Y axis, if you will. Let's use the toggle on the left and start sliding it in the direction that we want to do. All I'm doing is clicking on the number, holding it down, and then sliding my mouse. Essentially, it starts sliding it around. Obviously, you can input a specific value if you want, but for the purposes of this, we're just going to be using that sliding action: click, hold and slide. Let's say over here, the way you want to do this by zooming in, you can either use the roller on your actual mouse, the scroll wheel if you want to be technical about it. If you push the roller, it scrolls in and out or you can use the manual controls over here and click a percentage, let's say 100, and it zooms in. To navigate around here, what we are going to do is use another tool called this tool of the year; this is the Translate tool. I like to call him the Handy Boy. We click him, and then we have a hand, and we can click, hold and drag and move around. Again, let's use the actual, I don't know if you can see that, the scroll wheel, and we'll just scroll out so we can zoom in a bit so we can just have it lined up nicely on the edge, and then using the hand tool, we'll just move around. Let's say I want this car image to be in the corner over here. Let's select the selection tool again. Again, we can use the position controls or we can just use these green and right arrows which reference these actual controls. Let's use the green arrow, and we'll select it and move it up over here. Boom. We have it over there. Now, let's click this drop-down tab again and select "Scale to Fit"; this returns it to its basic size. We've covered a lot right there. Let's just take a moment to actually think about what we've done. We've learned how to zoom in using the scroll wheel or we can use the zoom feature over here by selecting a percentage. We've also learned that the hand tool or the Translate tool, if we select it, allows us to move our video around. Then, we've also learned that the selection tool, if we click it and we select here, we click "Scale to Fit", it returns the video to a normal position. Obviously, if you want to change the actual position of your video itself, you can also do that and we can click on the video, move to the Controls panel, and then, we can scale the video up and down, move it around, create a bunch of edits like that. We essentially have it like that. Now, it's all up to you. It's completely depending on what you want to do with this, but for the purposes of this, I want to undo all of that. What I'm going to do is hit back to the "Controls" panel. Click on the "Scale", right-click it, and click "Reset", and my video resets, but the position obviously will change. Let's click the "Position", right-click, and "Reset". Just like that, we've superimposed an image of a car onto our video. Obviously, what you can also do is just navigate around and just make sure that it starts and ends where you wanted to. The way we can do that, let's just zoom in like we did earlier using the Scale feature. Let's say obviously, we know that it starts where we want it to start, but let's say I wanted to stop at around 45 seconds over here. We can just drag the end in like we did earlier and boom. It's done.
7. Adding Music: At this point, we've assembled a pretty comprehensive edit. We have a few clips together, we have a picture in it, but there's one thing we haven't added, and that's music. Background music is extremely useful because it fills the dead space behind your actual speaking. Now if you have someone speaking continuously, even if you have infographics and things popping up on the screen to help your audience stay interested, to have a little bit of background music in the background, not too loud, just providing a little bit of a beat to the video it adds a lot of quality to your final product. To do that, it's very simple. It works just like we did with the videos. We're going to find our audio file, which is a song I have over here and this song is from a platform called Audio, which is a subscription music service that I'm part of. Although you can find a song anywhere, just make sure that it's copyright-free, but that's a whole other topic talk about just use any music that you have. There's lots of different free music places that you can get by just imported the same way like we did at the start. In order to actually use this audio file, we need to create a new audio layer. This works a little bit different so example, let's create this audio layer manually. We'll head over here to audio 1, and in this section we'll right-click and then we'll click, "Insert track" and boom, automatically we have audio 2 a brand new track for us to use. Let's then click to select our audio file, which is our music file in the media panel, and drag it in until it snaps into place in our timeline. Obviously, you can have it snap and start at which ever point you want, but I wanted to start right at the beginning. Now, obviously this audio file will be much too loud to be background music. If you played through it, you'll notice it's too loud. It's interrupting our actual voice of our speaker and it's making it difficult to hear. In order to the fix that, all we need to do is use this little line over here going through the middle of our audio track. If we hover over it, this arrow appears. If we drag this up and down, we are essentially changing the audio level or the loudness in volume of our clip. It's really that simple. We can just hover, drag it up and down and let's say around here, really, really soft is what I'm looking for. As you can see, it says around minus 46.67 decibels somewhere around there. We use it, play it by hear, play it back multiple times, adjust the audio up and down until it sounds suitable and comfortable for you. You can also use the audio meters over here as a reference because as play through, we can see that these audio meters are changing and my video is playing around minus 24. You may want to make sure that this doesn't go super high because if let's say we boost this audio really high and you can see it's now peaking and is turning red. Obviously, this is way too loud and your audience is going to start bleeding from the ears. You don't want that to happen so we want to lower it until it's a nice amount. Let's say around here and if you play through, it's not peaking, it's going well. Really, this is up to you and you need to play it by hear because there's no specific value to set to make it sound back around enough. It's all up to you and how loud you speak or how loud your main video is, that you need to adjust the sound.
8. Text and Lower Thirds: Adding text on top of your video is a really cool way to give your audience a short burst of information. It can read essentially whatever you want. But a really cool way to utilize text, especially as a beginner, is to create something called a lower third. You've seen this before at the start in my introduction video, it's this. Essentially what a lower third is, is a quick burst of information in order to display your name and maybe something else like a job title as I've used over here, my social media handle. This is a really cool animated one that I've made using a bunch of different techniques, but for beginner purposes, we can just use simple text in order to create a lower third. Lower thirds are usually displayed at the start of the video. So let's grab along our timeline right to the start. Let's say we want to create a lower third over here in the bottom left-hand corner. To do this, let's just select the "Text tool" up here, and then we have a nice familiar-looking typing cursor. Then let's click "Hold", and then drag to create a box around the area we want our text to actually appear. Let's then let go. Immediately, we have a flashing cursor, we can type a whole bunch of stuff here, but before we do that, let's actually navigate over here next to the media panel to the Text tab. The Text tab essentially will allow us to control the font, the outline size, the size of the text, the font size, the spacing, a whole bunch of stuff like that. Let's click over here, and let's actually type what we want to see. Let's say my name is Uwais Adam, and underneath, my Twitter handle, which is @RedAlerted. We now have our text, the problem is it's a bit too small, and the font is basic. Let's select our text. This is really important because you won't be able to actually use any of the controls here unless you have your specific text selected. So let's select the text like we would in any other program. Over here in the Text panel, this tab over here controls the size, so will just increase the size by dragging it along until it's nice and big. Boom, something like that. Then let's say we want to center the text, for example, we can use these controls here. This is very similar to programs such as Microsoft Word, so it's very easy to pick up. Let's click the "center alignment", and then it's centered. Then to move this around, we can actually use the Selection tool. If I click the "Selection tool" over here, it now turns into an ordinary video, and it actually operates just like any other video publisher. If you check here what HitFilm has done, is it created a new video layer in our second track called video 2 for our text layer. We can adjust and drag it so it appears as long as we want it, just like a normal video. With the Selection tool selected, let's select it, and then we can just move around until it's over here. Then using the Text tool once again, let's select our text, and then in the Text tab, let's change the font. A really cool font that I like to use is called Bebas. This is really nice, but we can select any other too, Billgates. I have the Black Panther one, really cool. Basically, whenever you download a font from any website and install it onto your computer, it will automatically pick it up. But let's say you want something classic, Bookman Old Style. A little bit basic I know, but for the purposes of this, it'll work. Here essentially, we've just created a lower third, just like that. Some of the other tools we can use, for example, is over here. We can use some of these tools to change around, the spacing and how tall the text is, how spaced out the words are, things like that. Basic things, but things that are really useful to know. Essentially, it's all up to you, just play around. If you want to just strikethrough, we can click this tool "strikethrough", "Underline", things like that. HitFilm has a bunch of new features. They never used to be this many features, but recently, they've added a lot more. We can click the plus sign by an outline, to add an outline, we can change the color of the outline, and see, we want it to be green. This looks a little bit like the 1950s movie right now if you slept on some texts, but play around with it. You can make it look really professional and really cool.
9. Color Grading: We're just about ready to export our first-ever sequence that we have just put together over this course. But before we do that, we need to add a few touches of color work to our video, because as you can see, it looks a little bit blunt right now. I'm not really going to go in depth with color science. Maybe that's an idea for another course. What we want to do though is just add a few simple concepts. The first one that I want you guys to remember is you always want to add contrast to your image. Now the brain and the eyes like to see images with white colors in an image that is really bright in white before being completely blown out. The dark colors, the blacks of the image is really dark and deep. Now that using the eye like this is because it pops and it looks nice. I don't know. I'm not a scientist. We're going to do that. Also, we want to pop the color a little bit more because this is looking a little bit washed out. That has to do a lot with what I actually did shooting this video because I shot it purposefully, pretty flat. So I have a lot more room to play around with in the editor. Let's move along the timeline to a portion we are not looking like a complete dweeb like here. Then in order to actually utilize the color effect, what we're going to do is make sure we have this selection tool. Let's head over to the effects panel. Now over here, what I want you to do is click the search bar and search for the levels histogram effect, we'll then click it and then we'll drag it onto our video that we wanted to be on, so in this video over here. Immediately it opens up the controls for the levels histogram in the actual controls tab for this video. Over here, we'll see a funny-looking scale. But this isn't something that I really want you guys to think about or worry about. Essentially, we have a white little arrow over here and a black arrow over here. Guess what? Those control the black and white values of the clip. This is very simple if you know something about color grading, this will be a bit too simple for you, but for those of you who don't know anything, all I want you to do is, you see where this peak is over here. Drag the black bar until it reaches there so that just before this it darkens up your shot overall. This white bar where this peak is, drag the white in to around these peaks over here actually. Essentially, what we've done, just play it by eye, you don't have to use science. You could just look with your eyes. If we turn it off by clicking the check mark over here, you can see that we've really popped our image a little bit more, but it's still looking a little bit washed out and colorless. To change that let's hit the fixed tab. Then we'll search for the hue if I can spell properly, hue saturation, and lightness effect. Again, same purpose we click, drag, hold and put it onto our video. Over here, all I want you guys to actually do is go to the master hue and then in the saturation tab, just increasing it. Now obviously if we go too much, it becomes way too colorful. If you go too little, it becomes black and white. Obviously, if you want to have a black and white video, that's how you would do it with the hue and saturation effect. But let's zero this out once again. Then let's just try playing it slowly until we have some color. Let's say around 18 or so. That looks like a good number to me. Look at the amount of work we've done with two simple effects with the levels and turn it off both of them, look, this clip is completely washed out. It's blunt, it looks boring. We could end our video out like that, but just by adding the levels histogram effect, dragging in the black arrow and the white arrow until it looks nice to our eyes, which is something that's really easy to do. Putting on the hue saturation to pop the color a little bit, dragging the saturation tab a little bit up to make it a bit more colorful. We've created a completely different looking video. It's really simple, it's really easy to do, and there's no reason why you guys shouldn't add just a little bit of work to your actual video.
10. Exporting: We've assembled a sequence including videos, music, picture, as well as color work. Now, let's prepare this for export, so we can take this file out of the actual software and have it be a video that we can post to our YouTube channel, our Instagram pages, and Facebook, if anyone still uses Facebook, and everywhere else. To get this ready, let's say I want my video to end at this point over here when my video does, so let's drag the music to end over there, and then we'll just go up and down and make sure that all our files do not exceed this point. Then to make sure that the video doesn't include any black space after all of my clips have ended, what I want to do is select this blue line over here that's over the timeline. We can do that by selecting the end and dragging it so that it ends at the same point that our video does. To make sure it does, we'll just zoom in over here using the timescale tool, and then we'll make sure that it ends right about there. Let's zoom in again so that it ends over here when our video does. Now, this blue section on the timeline tells HitFilm what the actual video is because if I haven't extended further than the contents of my video, it'll actually have some black space involved in the export. Now that we've selected and told HitFilm exactly what we want to export, let's actually export it. This is really simple because, at the start of this, we've actually selected all of the settings that we want for this video and HitFilm will automatically select the best preset in order to export your video art. Let's click this drop-down button right here next to Export, and then we'll say Add to Queue, and essentially what we want to do is select the In-to-Out Area. The In-to-Out Area is this blue section that we've just selected. Again, let me just go over that again. You head to the Export button, you click the drop-down, click "Add to Queue" and you click "In-to-Out Area". Automatically, it opens up the export tab for us. If we just decrease the size of this, well, actually, increase the size of this, we can see our video over here. It says ready and it's ready to export. Now, all we need to do is tell HitFilm the specific codec that we want our video to be exported as. This is really simple. All we need to do is click the drop-down button and click something like YouTube 1080p. This worked because our video is full HD and YouTube is a really good codec to use because it's H.264. A lot of in-depth, we can go there, but I would say, for anything, most videos select YouTube. Then we'll just click "Start exporting" and our video begins to export.
11. Conclusion: So over the course of this course, we've learned quite a bit. We have learned how to assemble a sequence, how to add music, sounded pics, add pictures, and from a beginner's point of view, it can be a lot to actually take in. What I would recommend is, attempt to actually create your own sequence using the project files that I have detailed down below in the project tab. This is a really cool way. Watch the course once again, maybe a couple of times, and assemble your own sequence using the clips we have down below, or even your own videos, and post it down below in the class projects tab. I'd love to see what you've been working on and give you guys some feedback. You can also email me, I'll also include that down below. DM me on Twitter. I'm also always available for questions and answers to help you guys along on your editing journey. Hope you guys have enjoyed this course. Please leave a review down below. Tell me what you think of this course. If you have any questions, as I just said, I'm always happy to help, and I'd love to see your work. Until next time, I'll see you guys when I see you.
Uwais Adam, YouTuber, Filmmaker, Movie Lover
