One of the most crucial tasks for any creator is to choose the right software to ease the workflow of their projects. As there are a huge array of products around, it is a difficult task to find out the right tool which will suffice without burning a hole in your pocket.
FXHome’s Hitfilm express is one such free post production software which is aimed at helping creators in projects and have recently launched campaign ‘Pay What You Want’ system for HitFilm Express users. The program was inspired by the HitFilm Express community’s requests for options to contribute to future development of the free video editing and VFX software. The program enables users to contribute financially, ensuring that those funds will be allocated for future development and improvements to HitFilm. Additionally, FXhome will contribute a percentage of proceeds from Pay What You Want to organisations dedicated to global causes that are important to the company and its community. Upon its launch, the company aims to donate a portion of its proceeds to the WWF and the Australia Emergency Bushfire Fund. The larger the contribution from customers, the more FXhome will donate.
In conversation with AnimationXpress FX Home marketing manager, Kirstie Tostevin shares how HitFilm is aiming help creators worldwide in 2020. Here is the excerpt:
How VFX technology is supporting the innovative content creation?
VFX tech is constantly being developed and improved. From our perspective, we’re always trying to add awesome new features to HitFilm that allow users to get their ideas into reality! One of our big additions to the software last year was the Foundry 3D camera tracker which really is a game-changer, allowing people to track their environment in a completely new way and opening up a whole new world of possibilities for VFX. We also added support for select AE plugins which has been received very well by our users, we hope to expand this in the future.
As the content demand is increasing how the brand is catering the creators?
Content creation is one of our huge focuses here as a marketing team. To cater to the ever-growing audience of HitFilm users, we have a diverse and skilled marketing team coming up with ideas and creating videos and imagery to populate our YouTube/social channels. We’ve recently increased the size of our content creation team too, hiring another skilled VFX artist which allows us to continue to create even more high-quality content and gives us another creative mind to help come up with interesting ideas!
Will you share how you look at the India market/ APAC region?
India has a large number of HitFilm users which is really great to see. It’s encouraging to know that the software we develop is helping creatives all over the world and we really enjoy seeing the huge range of different content. Everyone has different ideas of what they want to make in the software, but all our users share the same creative passion.
What are the factors do you think HitFilm might help to ease the post production workflow for the creators?
HitFilm is designed so that users can complete their entire post-production workflow in one piece of software. We aim to combine ease-of-use with power and accessibility which all help the users focus on their creativity. We’ll continue to add more features and refine the software to help the users. The development of our software is driven by user feedback.
How it is different from the existing post production software?
As an all-in-one editor, compositor and VFX tool, HitFilm gives the users everything they need within one piece of software. Being able to jump from your edit straight into a composite shot to add VFX, text or other elements before jumping straight back to the edit really helps the user workflow. HitFilm is loved by so many types of creators too, from filmmakers to VFX artists to vloggers and gamers! We hope that by having access to such a range of tools we can spark creativity in these users and allow them to add a little something extra to their videos which they wouldn’t have if they were created in another piece of software.
What is the business plan for FXHome 2020?
We have a lot of plans in the works for 2020, lots of awesome top-secret things are in the works as well as some things we are able to talk about. One of our biggest pushes is towards the community. We want to encourage people to get creative, push themselves, and share their work. We’re really proud of the community and we want to give more back, promote their work, and look at some new sponsorship opportunities. We’ve also just launched a ‘Pay What You Want’ system for HitFilm Express users so that they can get it for free or pay a small amount of money and get a whole load of add-ons. Between 10 per cent and 20 per cent of these donations go to good causes so we’re really excited to see how this goes over the year! The first cause we’re donating to is in aid of the Australian bush fire catastrophe.
How favourable was the year 2019 for FXHome?
We had some really amazing developments in both HitFilm and Imerge which we’re incredibly proud of. The feedback we got from users was overwhelmingly positive and 2020 is set to be another year of awesome changes and improvements!