Famed visual effects creator John Knoll (the co-creator of Photoshop and the Effects Supervisor of Star Wars/Pirates of the Caribbean) returns with a brand new version of Knoll Light Factory, which will now work with Motion and Avid, as well as FCP, Premiere Pro, and After Effects that it’s worked with in the past. (However, unlike 2.0, the Photoshop plug-in is no longer included with the video version and must be purchased separately.) For those of you who are unfamiliar with the software, it is specifically designed to allow you to make custom lens flares that can be used to simulate everything from shooting starts to warp fields. With that said, let’s get in depth with the newest version of Knoll Light Factory Pro!
Ease of Use
For most of the basic options, KLF Pro 2.5 is very easy to use. You can lay down your KLF effects on the track you want and then pull up the general options, like motion, scale, hue, and the like, which can be keyframed anywhere you want across your piece. Once you’ve done that, you just click on the ‘Options’ tab and pull up the Lens Editor which will let you load any of the 70 presets, which you can then tweak to your hearts content, or build your look from the ground up with any combination of the 22 primitives available. Primitives are individual parts of lens flares, and cover things like Glow, Disc, Ball, Fade Ring, etc. All of these Primitives are set on a central axis, so that when you drag the source flare around, the positioning of the other flare elements realigns with that source to simulate real light sources hitting the lens of the virtual camera.
The only small caveat to ease of use is for folks who puchase the disc version of this software (as opposed to downloading it from Red Giant’s site) and who are using MacDrive on their PC. The disc version is designed to sense the operating system it’s put in. MacDrive fool’s the disc’s programming into thinking that your computer is a Mac, which causes the disc to only show you the Mac files on it. Turning off MacDrive will allow you to see the correct PC files, which you can install in your computer and then restore your MacDrive settings.
Depth of Options
The depth of options on KLF Pro 2.5 are slim, yet very deep. They are slim because you’re dealing with a single type of effect: a lens flare. However, it’s deep because of how that effect can be combined with other layers and other programs. Additionally, the amount in which you can adjust each of the 22 flare primitives is impressive, as are the amount of ways you can combine them to get subtle effects. The combinations range from suns in the sky, to additional stars in the night, to photon torpedoes racing across the sky, to warp trails, to creative dissolves for credits. The 70 presets also allow you to try out a number of looks before going in and tweaking primitives, which further aids you picking the right options to use. Plus the Alpha channel options and the new Unmult options to create the correct Alpha channel for your flare will further allow you to create even more in-depth effects, like flares glimmering through smoke and atmospheric dust.
