Greetings,
Just offering a quick “heads-up”. FXhome, a software company based in the UK, is offering the introductory version of their extremely powerful HitFilm software for free until February 4, 2014. The only fee is that you either post about it on your Fcbk page or Twt about it via Twttr. The Introductory version is known as “HitFilm 2 Express” (normally $149 US) and the fully-featured version is HitFilm 2 Ultimate ($400 US).
The best way to describe HitFilm is “Premiere and After Effects mixed together with Motion’s interface” (at least, that’s my impression of it). The software requires a minimum of an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 64-bit versions of Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, OS X (Lion, Mountain Lion or Mavericks only - sorry, no Linux version), 4GB of RAM on the Mac, 2GB of RAM on Windows, 300MB of disk space, and a bare minimum of 512MB of VRAM (the minimum requirement being an Intel HD 3000 integrated graphics processor). Dedicated video cards are a preference and a list of all supported cards can be found here: http://hitfilm.com/ultimate/requirements
The Express version of HitFilm is very powerful indeed. Here is a short list of its capabilities:
- Advanced Video Editing Tools
- Basic Keying & Extraction
- True 3D compositing
- 2D Tracking & Stabilization
- Limited particle & simulation effects
- Lights, shadows, motion blur & depth of field
- Basic color correction
- Output to YouTube
- Handles up to 1080p video creation
- 103 effects built-in with NO plug-ins required
The Ultimate version adds the following:
- 3DS, LWO, OBJ model import (Blender is recommended for model creation)
- Animation and manipulation of models in full 3D space
- Full particle & simulation effects (to include Atomic particles, Fire & Shatter)
- Advanced color correction
- Handles 1080p AND 4K video creation
- up to three concurrent installations from a single license (Mac and/or Windows included)
- Advanced 3D particle simulation
- 3D camera tracking with mocha HitFilm (a limited version of mocha made specifically for inclusion with HitFilm)
- 158 effects built-in with NO plug-ins required
The Express version alone may act as a powerful alternative to Blender’s VSE.
The offer for the express version may be found here: