2430: I Made This

It’s been a surprisingly productive day, both in terms of “things I wanted to do” and “things I had to do”. I got the bit of work I had to do done, and even had time to write a hefty piece on One Way Heroics’ mechanics over on MoeGamer and make a short video about Atari classic River Raid.

Here’s said video, if you’re curious.

I wanted to take a moment to talk about making this video, as its production involved the discovery of a really fine piece of free software: Hitfilm 4 Express.

Hitfilm 4 Express is a fully-featured non-linear video editor in the Final Cut mould, with a particular emphasis on compositing. It allows you to import media in a variety of formats — both still images and video sequences — and edit them together using an extremely professional-looking (and rather daunting!) collection of tools. Once your masterwork is complete, you can then export it to all the usual formats as well as upload it completely seamlessly to YouTube with minimal fuss.

I’m particularly enamoured with the YouTube connectivity as my past experience with making movies using my PC has been with Windows Movie Maker, which by default exports in a horrible format that YouTube then has to spend several hours converting and optimising after you upload it. This video, meanwhile, was ready to watch mere minutes after uploading, suggesting that Hitfilm 4 Express was smart enough to encode it in the appropriate format for YouTube automatically without me having to do anything else. It even kept it in 1080p/60fps format, which is arguably a bit wasteful for a video about an Atari 2600 and 8-Bit game, but eh; YouTube viewers are picky bastards and whinge if you don’t upload in the highest quality possible even if it is of practically no benefit to the source material whatsoever.

Anyway. I’ve barely scratched the surface of what Hitfilm 4 Express offers so far, but I’m in love. It’s a full, professional-grade package for free that can be further expanded by purchasing effects modules that plug into it — which is where they make their money. It’s free software that isn’t riddled with toolbars for your browser, pop-up adverts and nag screens — it’s simply an excellent package that did exactly what I wanted it to with minimal fuss, albeit a little bit of reading the manual.

On that note, probably time for bed. (If you’re wondering about the posting time, Andie is working nights at the moment which means both our sleep patterns are pretty screwed. I’m taking advantage of the quiet time to Get Things Done.)