Hitfilm 4 Pro review

Everyone likes a plucky underdog, and it’s easy to warm to FX Home, a small software developer based in Norwich that brings the fight to Adobe After Effects and Autodesk Maya. Hitfilm specialises in particle effects such as smoke, bullets and explosions, basic 3D animation (of models created elsewhere), plus compositing tools to combine these elements with live footage to create photorealistic clips that can be added to your main project in your main video editing software. It comes with a generous selection of high-quality effects covering everything from colour correction to distortions and blurs to retro film effects.

It’s highly technical in places, but that’s because it gives the user full control over some seriously advanced features. How else are amateur filmmakers going to create 3D-modelled particles that respond to gravity and wind, release sparks as they bounce off surfaces, and sit convincingly in the 3D space implied by handheld camera footage? At £300, it’s a dream come true for students and amateur enthusiasts who want to make big action sequences on a small budget.

^ This project I created in Hitfilm 3 now enjoys more convincing deceleration and acceleration and more interesting lighting, thanks to the new features in version 4

It’s one thing for models and particles to look convincing; they also need to move convincingly. This is much easier to achieve with the introduction of Bézier keyframe animation. It gives the user precise control over the route between two points. This might be used to create a curved path for a graphic element to travel along, or an element that changes size or colour at a varying pace.

Animated paths with Bézier curves in three dimensions – there is a God!

Creating curved paths in 3D space is brilliantly implemented, with curves defined directly on the preview monitor and the split preview function giving an at-a-glance overview of all three dimensions. I found controlling the speed of spatial animations fiddlier, though. It’s done using the new Value Graph display on the timeline, but it’s confusing because the controls affect speed but the graph shows position (in three axes). I prefer Adobe’s approach of a dedicated Velocity graph with Bézier handles that interact directly with it.

I’d also have liked the option to separate speed across the various axes. This would have allowed vertical motion to follow a parabolic curve to simulate gravity, while keeping horizontal motion constant. While I’m writing my wish list for version 5, I’d also love to see something similar to Adobe After Effects’ Wiggle command for adding random variation to any parameter.

Hitfilm already supported 3D lighting, complete with shadows and the ability to define the shininess of 3D models. It now goes much further, with support for reflections of models on other models, refraction of light through models, improved handling of shadows and better control over how light sources reflects off models. The big breakthrough here is the ability to define the Roughness of a model, with higher values producing more diffuse highlights.

3D models can now reflect colours from other objects to produce livelier lighting effects

It’s still a long way short of the ray tracing techniques used elsewhere to produce highly photorealistic 3D graphics. Ray tracing tracks beams of light as they bounce around a virtual 3D space, and Hitfilm’s 3D render engine feels like an early prototype of the concept. It’s also frustrating that 3D models’ properties are only available in a pop-up window, which must be closed in order to see the model under your own project’s lighting. Then again, ray tracing would have crippled performance, whereas this implementation keeps the software reasonably responsive. The bottom line here is that 3D models can be made to look much more convincing than before. Metallic objects can have a matt or gloss finish and pick up reflected colours from their surroundings. A neat trick is to create a block-colour plane to simulate colours in the live action footage – green grass, for example – and set the plane to be invisible but still reflect off the 3D model.

There are lots of other new features. Particles can be spawned on a regimented grid. FX Home suggests this is useful for auto-generating cityscapes from a handful of building models. The software already supported basic internal animation a 3D model, such as for spinning propellers of a plane. It now supports Alembic 3D for complex animations created in software such as Maya or Cinema4D – not something I’ve had the opportunity to test.

There’s a small suite of audio effects, including the ability to apply Doppler Shift. This is the real-world effect that makes a police siren change pitch as the car passes, and it’s a nice touch that it can be applied automatically based on 3D animation of objects.

3D titles finally make an appearance in the form of Boris FX 3D. It offers detailed control over text formatting and includes some fun deform and shatter effects. Sadly it doesn’t interact with other objects in a shared 3D space, so there are no shared lighting settings and visibility is by layer order rather than distance from camera. FX Home tells us that its updated plug-in architecture means that, in future, plug-ins such as this will be able to be brought into its Unified 3D Space.

Boris FX 3D brings 3D text effects to Hitfilm

This isn’t the unequivocally positive review I’ve given previous versions of Hitfilm, but my enthusiasm for it remains as high as ever. FX Home understands its users well, and these new features will help them create sophisticated special effects that are more convincing than ever. We’re all used to seeing digital effects produced with astronomical budgets, and it’s incredible what one person can achieve in just a few hours with Hitfilm.