FXhome HitFilm 2 Video Ultimate Software

I bought this program from the Sony Website because I have Vegas Pro 12 and wanted to add more effects. I watched several promo videos and was impressed with what it could do. So I downloaded it and went to the site, hoping to find a downloadable manual I could use to orient myself. I found the only written material was comprised of short articles on the various parts of the program. Each was only a page or two long but contained numerous imbedded links. I've seen other online tutorials use this style and it is not a good way to learn. You can't automatically see what you are looking for without opening multiple screens. That gets very tedious and time consuming. There are many video tutorials available but all that I have seen suffer a huge flaw. The Hitfilm interface has too many small drop down menus which are nearly impossible to see on a video. I even enlarged some of the screens with my projector but then the menu items became too fuzzy to read. Going back and forth between youtube and your Hitfilm screen while trying to figure out which menu the instructional video just opened can drive you batty. It would help if the videos did a pop-up of the area being accessed so you can actually see what is being clicked....and SLOW down the delivery. It would also help if they don't jump from set up to finished render as if that magically happens! I hope the Infinite Skills company produces a training video for this at some point. They can at times go TOO slow but that is better than the unrelated bits and pieces approach provided here via videos.

I use it on one project for chanel 8 it worked fine. powererful software has a fairly large learning curve as it has so many features but there are lots of tuturials on youtube.

Powerful software for a reasonable price , highly recommend .

This software tries to fill the the long standing gap of video composing software for amateurs. We have the badly aging and still expensive After Effect that had been already abandoned by many professionals in favor of the modern hip software such as Foundry Nuke at the "low cost" end and Flame, Smoke, Flint, Ignition etc on the expensive, cost-like-medium-sized-house end. None are affordable by amateurs or very "indie" filmmakers and some, like Flame are even ridiculously out of reach. Hitfilm is trying to be a tiny little bit of all of them for far less than even the cheapest professional offering. And they definitely know how to play the cards. First they didn't go cheap, the Hitfilm bundles the old tried-and-true Mocha for camera solution tracking which already elevates the software from mere curiosity to a production worthy. Spot dead camera tracking is the bread and butter of all modern composing software and we have first thumbs up here. I am not sure everyone is aware how big thumb that is. Because the software stands on good camera tracking solution or crumble under bad one. Second, the whole software could be sold just as a particle plugin to other video editing apps for the same price. Because it shines here. And we are not talking about 2D particles either! The particles can happily live and integrate into your 3D world. Next we have 3D import with passable rendering engine behind it. It has no ray tracing, but it is quite robust with material editor and the 3d objects can be color graded in the hitfilm itself to fit into the scene. You can actually do a relatively good job on shiny objects like cars, planes, weapons and obviously failing at everything more "organic". But still, this is a 3D engine in a video composing software which makes the workflow quite WOW. And then we have all the "other" effects like green screens, gun flashes, rain, sparkles, flares that all happily work in 2D or 3D space. (Yes, you can "walk" through a rain). Each of them is good on their own. There are no cheap shots here. The developers are brutally aware that most of the intended audience have no prior training how to use any of those things so they spend rather significant amount on creating tutorials. Even so, the complexity of the topic doesn't help newcomers. It is easy to follow tutorial but still equally hard to create your own flow after seeing it. Composing software is not a weekend project and lot of amateurs may get discouraged by this. I actually have now version 3 of hitfilm that came with my upgrade to vegas pro+ for literally a hundred bucks more than I would pay for normal upgrade. At that rate this is a total steal. As you dig deep you realize that for some reason hitfilm is also trying to cut it as a standalone NLE editor. It is still not there with likes of Vegas, but it nerveless aims at that direction. I am pretty sure Sony is aware of this and so the bundling of Hitfilm with Vegas suite may seem as a trial to elbow Hitfilm into effect category out of NLE. But if the developers continue playing on the NLE fiddle, with all the goodies above, with the obviously very capable developing team, it can seriously eat from the pie of the two closes brothers. We will see, but it is my favorite toy now.