You have access to masks, blue/green screen keying, particle simulators, distortion effects, powerful colour correction tools - the list is impressive. This is this app’s biggest selling point, as it offers hundreds of effects and presets. Where HitFilm Pro truly shines however, is in the visual special effects department. Yes, you have the basic ones at your disposal, but little beyond that. It’s possible to manipulate the clips’ audio layers, and even apply some effects to them, but contrary to what HitFilm Pro offers in the way of visuals, your options there are pretty limited. You can keyframe any parameter and easily animate it over time thanks to the control panel’s sub-timeline There’s even a supplemental timeline section you can open up in the Controls panel to manually interact with all the keyframes you’ve created, allowing you to move them around, change their values, delete them, and even add new ones with ease. You can animate pretty much any clip’s value, be it its basic properties (like size, position, opacity), or any effect you apply to it (or to the layer as a whole). The editing side has everything you’d expect, from standard tools like blade, slip, slide and roll, to navigating along your timeline, either by mouse, or keyboard (thanks to the newly implemented JKL shortcuts). Depending on your computer’s power, HitFilm has support for up to 8K video. It’s easy to import your media, preview it, set in and out points, and insert clips into your project. If you’re coming in fresh, you’ll be able to adapt quickly to this particular method of working and will easily enjoy all that HitFilm Pro has to offer. It’s fair to say that this negative view comes from experience of other video editing programs.
Other editors have done away with such separation making for a more seamless experience, allowing you to simply focus on your editing, without having to work in a way that feels unnecessarily convoluted.Įditing is as straightforward as you’d expect It’s like something you used to have to deal with back in the 90s.
This feels unnecessarily cumbersome, especially since many effects can be applied within the app’s editing section (those that can’t are greyed out and labelled “(layer only)”). The interface is divided into two parts: although you can add effects and titles to your project, from simple letters appearing on screen to complex 3D animations, all from within HitFilm Pro, you can’t actually do it all while editing: in order to add some of those effects, you need to turn your clip into a composite shot, which prepares it for all manner of alterations that will be applied to it. The workspace on display is versatile enough so you can easily change the layout to suit your needs, adding, removing or reordering panels as you see fit.