Using the exercise files - HitFilm Express Tutorial

- If you're a premium member, you have access to the exercise files used throughout this course. These files can be found on the exercise files tab, on the main course page. I'll be providing you several preproduction documents. You can peruse those in your own time, since we won't have the opportunity to go into them in much detail in the course. I'll also be providing you some of the footage that we captured during the shoot. As you can see, I've organized it into different categorized folders. Now you can bring this into any editing software and edit your own version of the video if you like. In this course we use the software Hit Film Express because it's a free software for both Mac and PC and it has a lot of really great features that surpass other free editing solutions. Also, it's very similar in layout to many other editing softwares, so you'll be similar in layout here and then apply them to so many other platforms. We go into details of how to use the software in the post production chapter, but let me give you just a brief primer now, in case you want to get yourself set up. Okay so there are actually two downloads for this course. There's the regular exercise files and then there's this folder called Demo Learning Hit Film. Let me first talk about this demo media. This is simply a folder of media that you can use to practice with in any software that you choose. It contains some music, it contains an interview and then it contains a bunch of B roll footage of a chocolatier making some truffles. And then this interview talks about that process. So I include this generic media because in chapter four of this course, I demonstrate how to use the software Hit Film Express and I use these assets in that demo, okay? So this is here for you if you like to follow along with me in chapter four, but if you're working in different software you can also feel free to us this however you like. Then there are the exercise files. Inside here are some preproduction documents that you can take a look at. And there's also media and project. I'm going to start with media. First of all I do talk a lot in this course about how we shot everything in 4K, which is a nice large resolution, but all of that did come out to a bit over 16 gigabytes, so in order to give you a more reasonable download size for your exercise files, I did compress that. So you'll be working with HD media. Inside of media I have footage and then we have our wide shots and our close ups and also some assets that we shot for the introduction of this video. We have music and some still images as well. Now, I want to mention that you can work with this footage in whatever software you like. Just import it and go, but again, because we are using Hit Film Express in this course due to it being a pretty robust and free and multi platform option, I have provided you with the Hit Film Project, okay? So you just simply double click on this project file and the project will open. Before I do that though, I am going to just select it and duplicate it and I'll explain why once I'm in the software. So I'm just going to press command D, okay? And I'm going to open the duplicate. So I'll just double click. Alright and the first time you launch, you may need to relink, which is very easy. I'm just going to double click on this top file to relink and once I find this file, then all the rest will relink as well. So I'll double click and then I know it's in my media folder and it's currently looking for this first close up, so that's in footage and close ups and I'll just select this first close up and say open and then once it finds that one file, everything else will relink as well. Everything's online here in my editor, as well as over here in my media window, okay? Now I had duplicated this project and the reason, is that in Hit Film, you can only have one sequence in your editor or in your timeline at a time. So if you want to follow along and work from scratch, you can see what I've done here, or you can just delete this and then start from scratch. So I'm just going to select one of these files and then press command A, or control A on a PC. Then everything is selected and I'll just delete and now I have an empty editor timeline, but I still have all of the footage that I can get started with editing something from scratch, okay? And then if I want to, I can go back to the original here that still contains all of my edits. If you don't have access to the exercise files, you can still follow along in the course and learn a lot of valuable information about making a video on how to teach a skill.