Applying Optical Flares

Let's take a look at how to apply and work with optical flares. Now, at this point if you're watching this training series, hopefully you know how to apply an effect. So that's not a big deal, but there are some things with using optical flares that you should be aware of. So in this comp I'm going to go to Layer > New > Solid. Just make it the same size as the comp. Any color. Click OK, and I'm going to apply the optical flares effect. Now what I want to show you here, is at the very, the the bottom of the effect here we have a render mode.

We could render on black, which actually creates a black background. So, even if I were to go back to my solid, and go to Layer > Solids > Settings and let's change this to like red, or some wacky color. It still renders on black, which is really cool because oftentimes I forget what color my solid is, and, and I feel stupid. But this will go ahead and give you a black background, which is great. because then what we could do is use a transfer mode, such as Add or Screen, usually, to combine that, and overlay it to our footage. And then I can go in, and I can move my flare around, and I can see what's going on.

Now, I could also choose Normal, and then go back to the render mode, and change this from On Black to On Transparent. And then, we just have this flare that's just on a transparent background, which is great. And we could also choose to render over original. So, if we have original footage, or if I have this ridiculous red solid, I could do that. Now, the reason why I'm sharing this with you is because, this is super handy to be aware of. A lot of times when I have flares, I might not want the flare to be that bright.

But if I render on black, in order to get rid of the black I have to use one of these really bright transfer modes. Which loses a little bit of the color of the flare and makes the light more intense. So, I can choose to render on transparent. Likewise, sometimes when you're pre-composing, blend modes don't come through unless you click this little button right here where you collapse the transformations and sometimes you might not want that. So on rare occasions, you might want it to be on transparent, or render on transparent, for that reason as well.

So, with that out of the way, let's get to looking at how to use optical flares.