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Hey, former Indy Mogulers! My name is Alexander, and today I'll be attempting to show you how
to make a muzzle flash in under 3 minutes. The first thing you'll need to do, is shoot
your footage. Remember not to shoot the gun against the sun, so that the flare will be
visible, and try to keep the tip of the barrel of the gun visible at all times. Now that
you've shot your footage, import it into your compositor of choice, which for me is After
Effects. If, however, you are only interested in the flash itself, you can probably pull
it off in your default editing application. But, back in After Effects, create a new composition
with the same settings as your footage. Then, you want to find the frame of your footage
where the gunshot is supposed to happen. If your audio file helps you, simply hit LL on
your keyboard to bring up the waveform. Once you've found it, drop in your muzzle flash
and trim it down to just one frame. You might also have to position, scale and rotate accordingly.
A good indicator of the scale is the size of the gun. If you don't have any muzzle flashes,
do not worry! I made a couple of free ones for you, and you can download them just by
clicking on the link over here. However, I do strongly suggest that you buy Video Copilot's
Action Essentials 2 collection. Once you've put in your muzzle flash, you have the basic
effect, which you can pull of in any editor. However once we are in After Effects, the
magical playground of visual effects, lets spice it up a little bit by adding some lighting
and some smoke. Adding your lighting is very easy! Simply duplicate your layer by hitting
command or control D on your keyboard, and set it to Add mode. Next, trim your layer
to just two frames; the one with gunshot, and the one right after that, and mask around
the object that you want to be lit. You might also want to lower your layer's opacity a
little but, which you can do by hitting T on your keyboard. Now, the smoke is a little
bit more complicated. First, you have to create a new null object, and then you have to motion
track the tip of the barrel of the gun. If you don't know how to motion track, check
out Video Copilot.net; Andrew Kramer is the awesomest of visual effects artists, and he's
done a great in-depth tutorial on tracking. Once you've tracked it, paste the information
on the null object. Then, add in your smoke element, align it properly, and parent it
to the null. Color grade your shot, add in your sound effects, and here is what you have:
Thank you for watching, and if you enjoyed, please subscribe to my channel for more tutorials
and filmmaking goodness. See ya!