STEP 1:Create two copies of your original footage
We’re all familiar with the LightBlast filter, which takes the colors of an image and creates light streaks out of them. It essentially turns the main object into an explosion of light streaks. There’s a variation of this filter in some plug-in packages that creates this effect, but only along the edges of the main object in the footage. This creates an effect that’s a bit more subtle, as you can see in the examples.
Recreating this effect with AE’s built-in filters is pretty straightforward. First, you need two copies of the original footage. You’ll be using the Screen blend mode to put the light rays on top of the original footage, so make a copy of the footage that’s on top of the original and select it.
STEP 2: Apply Find Edges filter before lightBurst
Apply the Find Edges filter and select the invert option. This will give you white edges on a black background. Apply Hue & Saturation, set Master Saturation to -100, which eliminates all the colors produced by Find Edges. For our purposes here, it’s easier to work with a grayscale image. Apply Levels and push the black arrow almost all the way to the right edge. We want to isolate the most significant edges, creating only a few bright white edges.
Now apply the CC LightBurst 2.5 filter. This creates the rays coming off the edges. Try setting the Ray Length to 150 to make the light rays a bit longer. (You might want to apply a small blur before applying LightBurst. This usually softens the lines if they’ve become aliased because of Find Edges or Levels.)
STEP 3: Change your blend mode
Change the blend mode to Screen (if you haven’t already) and you’ll have light rays blasting out from behind the main objects in the footage. You can fiddle around with Levels and the LightBurst Center parameter to get slightly different effects.
STEP 4: Colormama Baby!
If you want to get really crazy, apply the Colorama filter to your LightBurst layer to colorize the light rays. OK, it looks pretty hideous, doesn’t it? But try this: Go to the Output Cycle section and select the Fire preset. You’ll get flaming light rays coming off your objects. Pretty cool effect, huh?
STEP 5: Now for the really cool part
Select all the filters in the Effects Control Window, from Find Edges through Colorama. Go to the Animation menu and select Save Animation Preset. Name the preset something like "My EdgeBurst" and save it. If you want to apply this same effect to a different piece of footage, you can just select that footage, go back to the Animation menu and select Apply Animation Preset. Select your EdgeBurst preset and Viola! You’ve created a plug-in for After Effects. All the filters you used originally are applied to your new layer/footage, creating the same effect. You can still go into Levels or Colorama and make changes to adjust the effect.
Your Guide
Jim Tierney
President
Digital Anarchy
Jim is a longtime After Effects plug-in developer and has worked on numerous award-winning products from companies like MetaCreations, Atomic Power and Cycore. As "Chief Executive Anarchist" at Digital Anarchy, he conceptualizes and designs plug-ins of all kinds.
Jim says keep in mind…
Sometimes it seems as if After Effects users don’t realize that AE comes with filters built in. As a plug-in developer, I think this is great because it means people continue to have huge appetites for third-party plug-ins. Many third-party plug-ins are well worth the money, but there are more than a few that a) are only slight variations of plug-ins that come with AE (as in, they’re free) or b) are easily reproducible with those plug-ins that come with AE.
For example, did you know that:
  • The After Effects Production Bundle comes with 240 plug-ins. Many of these used to be in expensive third-party plug- in packages like Evolution, Cult Effects and Final Effects.
  • Animation Presets let you save out com- binations of filters that you can later ap- ply to other footage in other projects. In essence, this lets you build filters out of the filters that come with AE.
  • Many third-party filters use the same algorithms as the AE filters and just combine them in different ways. By using and combining AE’s built-in filters you can recreate many of these same effects.
Can you see where I’m going with this? It’s time to think like a plug-in developer and I’m here to help. In this tutorial, we’ll take some powerful AE filters and create new filters using them. You can download the project I’m using, along with a good selection of Animation Presets (filters created using combinations of AE’s built-in filters) from: www.digitalanarchy.com/studiomonthly/creating_filters.zip.
Digital Anarchy
www.digitalanarchy.com
218 Cordova Avenue
San Francisco, CA 94112
ph. 415.586.8434
jim@digitalanarchy.com
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To learn how to turn this into a regular plug-in you can share with other users, read more at www.studiomonthly.com.