The only downfall I ran across in the workflow was that some of these plugins rely heavily on being mapped to masks. You can’t really just throw them over top of video and expect to see decent results. So if you’re a novice After Effects user who has never learned about masks, the workflow might seem a little confusing at first. But the tutorials on the website should be enough to get anyone started in a reasonable amount of time.
Depth of Options
Since there are five distinct modules in this package, I’ll describe them each separately:
Flare can produce some incredibly complex and artistic lens flares that are a step above other flare emulators.
Flare: Produces lens flares, but not ones like you’ve ever seen before. Some of these flares are works of art, and are massive in their details and complexity. There are presets that control not only the size, color, and shape of the main section of the flare, but also ones that change the trails and halos of the flare. This allows for a seemingly infinite number of flares able to be customized, and that’s just using the included presets. I’m not sure how photo-realistic any of these flares are, but I don’t think they’re meant to be. They are, however, very cool-looking, and could easily find their way into title sequences or transition effects.
Starsfall: Basically a particle emitter that creates little stars or blobs of light over time. The emitter can be mapped to any sort of vector or mask, so that the stars seem to come from the mask, a trick which works especially well on text. I like this effect a lot, especially the presets with the more diffuse stars. There’s also a great tutorial on the AlphaPlugins website that shows how to quickly use this module to create an effect of stars coming out of a magic wand that a kid is waving around. The result is very photorealistic, and much easier to setup than most particle engines because of the great presets.
Highlight: Emulates a traditional star filter. Takes the brightest parts of the picture and turns them into sparkling stars. This one is pretty simple, and you can find other plugins that do the same thing, though not any better than what you’ll get here. The variety of stars you can create is massive, and the pictures on the presets give you good ideas for which types of stars to use on different types of footage (for example, a darkened cityscape shot should get blurrier, warm stars, while an ocean shot would get bright white sharper sparkles).
Rays: Simulates flames and rays of light. This can produce an output very much like Trapcode’s Shine if desired, except that the effect can’t be “shined” through video; it only works along a mask, text, or vector shape. However, one thing it does a lot better than Shine is to create an effect that looks a lot like fire; so much so that you could probably use it to map fire onto your video in a photorealistic manner. Again, you can make it follow a mask, so it would be very easy to draw masks around objects and then set them on fire with this plugi
The Blink module will add a rainbow flash to your footage that looks like light reflecting through a prism.
Blink: Adds rainbows to your screen, and can also be used to emulate reflective twinkles of light; kind of like a star filter, except you can put the star on any object, not just on a highlight. This is definitely the most retro-looking module in the bundle, and also the most basic, as its only function is adding singular rainbows or prisms onto your video.
