Since I’ve been fortunate enough to work mainly on features, I’m afforded the time to do the R&D to get these custom looks. Personally, I like to design/create my own effects using the “standards” (levels/exposure/curves/blur/displacement), and expressions and scripts I write for the function. The 3rd party plug ins just “make workflows faster/more efficient”. You can do *nearly everything* that the 3rd party plug ins do, right in After Effects, using the built in plug ins. No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced. (The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)
CC Light Burst or CC Light Rays coupled with some color correction effects should do it. is easy by using keyframes and/or a wiggle expression.Īs far as building a better looking flare goes, I tried a Google search for better lens flare after effects and got some good results:Īnd a tutorial on Creative Dojo that also links to a good Harry Frank tutorial on the same subject I believe they use a 3rd-party plugin called Shine for some of it, but you can recreate Shine with some of the built-in effects too.
The plugins are better for many things (that’s why they were created), but in many cases you can get a similar look with AE’s built in stuff. There are many alternatives to Optical Flares and Knoll Light Factory using just AE’s built-in effects.