Lens Flare

Light Position and Optical Center are the two control points, both draggable in the comp. Light Position goes on the source — a practical, a window, a muzzle flash, the sun. Optical Center is the lens axis, and it defaults to the middle of frame because that’s where a real one is; the ghost stack is what reads from it, mirrored along the line running from the light through the center. Other elements stay with the light — the halo wraps the source, the streak crosses it — so Optical Center is specifically the ghost train’s control. Two reasons to move it: matching a shot where the frame has been reframed or cropped off-center, and deliberately faking a lens the camera isn’t actually looking through. Animating Light Position is the primary motion in most shots — track it to a moving light and everything else re-places itself for free.

The Preset popup stamps one of 63 factory looks. A look describes the lens and its light: the element dials, the silhouettes of the first eight ghosts, and the global Brightness, Global Tint, Hue Shift, Flicker and Flicker Speed, so picking a preset resets those five to the look’s own values. What none of them carry is a position, so your two control points stay exactly where you put them and you can audition Warm Cine against Anamorphic Blue against Sodium Night without re-placing anything. The popup reads Custom as soon as you touch a dial, which is the expected workflow: preset first, then make it the shot’s.

Seed picks which random draw the flare’s variation is built from. Turning it changes nothing you dialed — same values, different roll — so it’s the fastest fix for a jitter pattern that happens to land badly against something in frame, and the way to make two instances on two lights in the same comp read as siblings rather than clones. It’s a slider, not a dice button: the number is a stored value like any other, so once a roll looks right, nothing re-rolls it behind you.

Render Mode decides how the flare leaves the effect. Flare Only renders it on its own alpha — the compositing workhorse: put it on an adjustment or solid above the plate and blend, grade, or offset it independently. On Black gives an opaque plate for pre-renders. Screen and Add composite straight over the layer’s own content for one-layer setups, Add being the hotter of the two. Source Mask is a checking view for Light Detection: instead of the flare it shows what the detector sees, with a ring on each light it found.

Randomize rolls a new look instead of picking a stored one, and Randomize Scope decides how much of the flare the roll may touch. Everything redesigns the whole look. Main Look only rebalances the overall brightness and the main level of each element that is already on, without redesigning anything. Colors Only recolors the flare from one coherent palette and leaves every shape alone. Glow & Rays, Burst & Streaks, Ghosts, Halo and Blobs & Dirt each redesign one part and leave the rest as it was, and a scoped roll always switches its own part on, so rolling the halo never lands on an invisible one. Rolls never touch your placement, the Master group, Render Mode, the detection and occlusion settings, any layer pick, the per-ghost slot settings (a roll can still give ghosts a shape) or the seeds, so a rolled look drops straight into the shot you set up.

New Seeds is the other button: it draws fresh values for Seed, Texture Seed and Dirt Seed together, so the look stays and only its random variation changes. Dump Look is a utility for building factory presets; it stays hidden in a normal install and you can ignore it.

Five dials trim the assembled flare after every element has summed — three for level and color, two for its life over time — which makes them the fastest route to matching a plate without re-balancing eight groups.

Brightness is the output level, 100 neutral. Brightness 60–90 sits a flare into graded footage that the element defaults overpower; 130–180 is the sci-fi push. Global Tint multiplies the whole flare toward a color — leave it white and let the element colors speak, or pull everything a few percent warm to unify a flare built from mismatched parts. Hue Shift rotates every element’s hue at once, which is the dial to reach for when a preset’s structure is right but its color is wrong: rotate the whole palette instead of re-picking six swatches, and the relationships between core, ghosts, and streak survive intact.

Flicker modulates the flare’s energy over time and defaults to 0, so the flare is rock steady until you ask for life. Flicker 5–15 is the working zone — arc lamps breathing, a practical fighting its ballast, a beacon that isn’t perfectly regulated. Past 40 it reads as a failing lamp, which is a look but rarely a subtle one. Flicker Speed sets the rate: low values give a slow swell, the default 8 a nervous shimmer, and the top of the slider a buzz that will strobe against your frame rate. Master Speed multiplies Flicker Speed, so a whole flare’s temperament slows for a slow-motion shot without touching this dial.

Every preset sets all five of these dials, so picking a new preset overwrites them. Pick the look first, then trim here.

The four macros ride a finished look, and 100 is neutral on all of them.

Master Amount multiplies Brightness — one slider to fade the entire flare up through a cut or down under a title, with every element’s balance preserved. Master Scale is the whole-flare scale: one dial to open the optic out or pull it in, at the proportions you already dialed, instead of a pass over every size in the effect. Reach for it when the flare is right but wrong-sized against the frame — a big source that needs to fill more of a title card, or a hero look that has to sit small on a background practical — and keyframe it when the flare itself should grow. Master Speed multiplies every rate at once (Flicker Speed, Ray Evolution and Breakup Stream), so a preset’s whole temperament slows down for a slow-motion shot in one move. Master Complexity multiplies how much stuff is in the flare: Ghost Count, Ray Frequency, and Secondary Spikes together. Down toward 40 for a clean, cheap, restrained optic; up toward 160 when the lens should look busy and dirty.

The standing rule applies here as everywhere in the suite: ride either a Master dial or the dials it folds, never both animated at once, or the scaling compounds.

Element trims. Eight trims sit under the macros, one per element: Glow Trim, Ray Trim, Spike Trim, Ghost Trim, Halo Trim, Streak Trim, Blob Trim and Dirt Trim. Each multiplies one element’s level (Glow Intensity, Ray Intensity, Spike Intensity, Ghost Intensity, Halo Intensity, Streak Intensity, Blob Intensity and Dirt Amount), with 100 neutral and 0 removing the element. Together they work like a mixer over the finished look: pull the ghosts down for one shot, push the halo for another, without opening the element groups. Presets and Randomize never write the trims, so your mix survives a preset change or a roll, and each one keyframes on its own.

By default the flare comes from one light, the one at Light Position. Light Mode can hand that job to the footage. Manual Point, the default, is the single placed light, and every other dial in this group does nothing. Auto from Source finds the bright spots in the layer the effect is applied to and gives each one its own complete flare, so a night plate full of street lamps flares wherever the lamps are, with no tracking. Manual + Auto keeps your placed light and adds the detected ones after it. Each detected light also gets its own occlusion, so with an Occluder set, lights dim one by one as they pass behind it.

Detection reads the layer’s pixels fresh on every frame, with no memory of earlier frames, so it follows lights that move and gives the same answer however the frames are rendered.

Detection Threshold is how bright a spot has to be to count as a light: lower it until the lights you want are found, raise it when dim highlights start to flare. Light Source Size sets how much the image is smoothed before the search, in percent of frame height: small values catch small practicals, larger values look for broad sources and ignore specks. Max Lights caps how many lights get a flare (8 at most, your placed light included). Min Separation is how far apart two bright spots must be to count as separate lights; closer peaks merge into one. Per-Light Falloff scales each detected flare by how bright its source is: at 0 every light gets the same flare, and toward 100 the dimmer lights get proportionally weaker ones.

Set Render Mode to Source Mask while you tune. It shows what the detector sees, with a ring on each light it found, so you can watch the threshold and separation do their work before switching back.

The bloom sitting on the light itself — the part that says “there is a source here” before any of the lens artifacts register. It’s the one element that should almost always be present, and the one most often overdone.

Glow Intensity is its level, Glow Size its radius. The pairing matters more than either value alone: a small, hot core (Glow Size 8–14 with Glow Intensity 110–140) reads as a stopped-down lens pointed at the sun, while a wide, gentle one (Glow Size 30–45 at Glow Intensity 90–110) reads as a soft practical in atmosphere. Glow Falloff shapes the decay between those extremes — higher values fall off fast and keep the energy pinned near the source, lower values let it bleed outward. Glow Falloff 1.2–1.6 is the hazy, diffused end; 3 and above is the crisp midday end.

Glow Inner Color and Glow Outer Color split the core by radius. The factory pairing is a white center burning out into amber, which is what an over-exposed warm source actually does — the middle clips to white regardless of the source’s color, and only the falling-off edge shows the hue. Keep Glow Inner Color white for anything meant to read as blown-out and put the character in Glow Outer Color; tint the inner color only for lights that are genuinely colored rather than merely hot, like a signal lamp or a screen.

The soft radial streaks fanning out of the light — scatter off dust, coatings, and imperfections in the glass. Where the starburst is geometric and deliberate, the rays are the irregular, organic layer, and they’re what keeps a computed flare from looking stamped.

Ray Intensity brings them in; the default 55 is a visible but supporting level, and past about 120 they start competing with the core for attention. Ray Frequency sets how many of them run around the light — low values give a handful of broad shafts, high values a fine bristle. Ray Sparseness then removes some of them, and it is the dial that decides whether the fan looks synthetic or real: at 0 every ray is present and evenly spaced, which reads as a machine; the default 55 punches irregular gaps into the pattern, which reads as glass. Ray Sparseness 35–65 covers most footage.

Ray Sharpness controls each ray’s angular profile — low values give wide soft wedges that blend into the core glow, high values thin hard needles. Ray Length is their reach out from the light; Ray Length 25–60 keeps them local to the source, and 100 and up turns them into shafts crossing the frame. Ray Rotation spins the whole fan, which is how you keep two flares in the same comp from wearing identical patterns.

Ray Evolution is the rate at which the fan changes over time. At 0 the pattern is frozen, which is correct for a locked-off shot with a locked-off light. The default 0.15 is slow enough that you notice it only in motion; Ray Evolution 0.5–1 is an actively shimmering source, the read for a flame or an unstable arc. Remember Master Speed multiplies this alongside Flicker Speed, so ride the macro when the whole flare should run slower or faster.

Breakup. Ray Breakup beads the rays apart along their length, tips first: the part near the light holds while the outer part crumbles into separate segments. At 0, the default, it’s off. A little goes a long way, since around 15 already reads as beads, and higher values cut deeper toward the light. Ray Breakup Scale sets the size of the beads. Ray Breakup Tips decides where the cuts land: at 0 they spread evenly along the ray, at 100 they build steadily toward the tip, and at 200 they crowd the very ends. Breakup Stream sets the beads moving along the rays: positive values stream them outward, negative values run them the other way, and 0 holds them still. It is one shared rate for the rays, the starburst and the streak, and Master Speed scales it with the other rates. Ray Breakup Chroma splits the cuts by color channel, so the beads pick up colored edges. Shattered Sun, Ember Drift, Prism Spray and Frayed Beacon start with ray breakup on.

The hard diffraction spikes that a stopped-down iris throws off a bright point. This is the most physically-determined element in the effect, and the one that instantly dates a flare when it’s wrong.

Spike Count Mode is the decision. Left on Auto (from Blade Count), the spike count is derived from Blade Count over in the ghost group, following the parity rule real lenses obey: an even number of blades produces that many spikes, an odd number produces twice as many. A 6-blade iris gives six spikes; a 9-blade iris gives eighteen. That’s why the flare re-shapes coherently when you change the aperture — you’re describing one lens, not decorating two elements. Switch to Manual when you need a count the physics won’t give you, and Spikes (Manual) sets it directly: Spikes (Manual) = 2 for the two-spike bar of an anamorphic front element, Spikes (Manual) = 4 for a cross-filter look.

Spike Intensity and Spike Length size the burst against the rest of the flare. Spike Sharpness sets how tightly each spike is drawn — low values give broad soft blades that read as haze off the iris, high values the needle-thin lines of a genuinely stopped-down lens; Spike Sharpness 40–70 is the clean daylight end. Spike Rotation turns the whole star, which is worth doing on any shot where the default alignment lands awkwardly against frame edges or a horizon.

Three dials break the symmetry, which is where believability lives. Length Jitter varies the spikes’ lengths so they don’t read as a stamped asterisk — 20–40 is enough on most shots, 60 and up for a lens that’s been abused. Secondary Spikes fills in a shorter interleaved set between the main ones, adding density without adding reach; it’s folded by Master Complexity. Spike Chroma separates color along each spike’s length, the prismatic fringing a diffraction pattern actually has — Spike Chroma 15–30 is a subtle truth, 45 and above is the hero-shot version.

Burst Breakup beads the spikes apart the same way, from the tip inward, with its own pattern on every spike, and Burst Breakup Scale sets the bead size. It shares Breakup Stream with the rays, so a streaming setting moves the spike beads too. Shattered Sun, Static Comet and Frayed Beacon ship with it on.

The chain of aperture-shaped reflections marching along the axis from Light Position through Optical Center. It’s the biggest group in the effect because it’s the element with the most personality: ghosts are where a lens shows its age, its coatings, and its blade count.

The stack and its placement. Ghost Count sets how many reflections there are — folded by Master Complexity, so the presets’ counts scale with it. Ghost Spread is how far along the axis they travel; low values keep a tight train hugging the source, high values throw them clear across the frame. Behind-Center Balance splits the stack across the optical axis: at 0 every ghost sits between the light and the center, and raising it pushes a growing share out past center to the far side — the default 35 is the mixed distribution most lenses show. Ghost Spacing decides the rhythm: Clustered bunches them toward one end for the dense-groups-and-gaps look of a multi-element zoom, Uniform steps them evenly for a clean modern optic, and Random scatters them for something older and less deliberate.

Size and level. Ghost Size is the base scale, Size Variation makes them disagree with one another (the default 60 is healthy — identical ghosts look printed), and Ghost Intensity sets the stack’s overall level. Intensity Falloff then grades that level across the stack: at 0 the ghosts all carry the same brightness and the train reads as an even chain, and raising it widens the spread between the strongest and the faintest so the stack tails off instead of marching at one level. The default 1 is a gentle grade. Drop Intensity Falloff toward 0.4 when the whole train needs to survive against a bright plate, and push it toward 2.5 when only part of the stack should be legible and the rest should be a suggestion.

The aperture itself. Blade Count is the iris description, and it shapes every ghost as a polygon with that many sides — six blades give hexagons, nine give nonagons. It also drives the starburst whenever Spike Count Mode is on Auto (from Blade Count), so this is the single dial that defines the lens. Blade Roundness blunts the polygon toward a circle: Blade Roundness 0–20 keeps the hard-edged mechanical read, 100 gives the perfectly round ghosts of a wide-open iris or a soft-focus portrait lens. Aperture Rotation turns all of them together, and Rotation Jitter breaks that lockstep so each ghost sits at its own angle — it defaults to 0 because a real iris doesn’t rotate between reflections, but a little jitter is a fast route to a “dirty, mismatched glass” look.

Edge quality. Softness feathers the ghost edges, and Softness vs Distance ramps that feathering outward so the distant ghosts blur while the near ones stay defined — the default 60 does most of the work of making a stack look photographed rather than drawn. Hollowness empties the ghost centers into rings, which is the uncoated-vintage-glass signature; Hollowness 30–55 is the useful zone before they turn into pure outlines. Chromatic Fringe splits color across each ghost’s edge. The default 10 is a modern coated lens; 55–70 belongs on old glass.

Ghost Color A and Ghost Color B are the two colors the stack draws from, so the train runs a palette instead of a single hue. The factory pairing is two warm coated-lens tones, an amber and a softer tan. Set both to near-neutral for a clean modern lens, or push them to complementary saturated colors when the flare is a design element rather than a lens artifact.

The ghosts’ character beyond the aperture polygon. Every dial here is neutral at its default, so the stack looks like the plain aperture ghosts of the Ghosts (Aperture) group until you reach in. This is the group that stops a ghost train from reading as a row of identical circles.

Ghost types. Five weights decide what kind of reflection each ghost is. Each ghost draws its type at random, weighted by these dials, so you set a mix rather than a single type. Type: Aperture is the polygon from Blade Count, and at its default of 100 (with the others at 0) every ghost is one. Type: Disc is a round disc. Type: Anamorphic stretches the ghost into an oval across the streak axis. Type: Bubble is a thin bright shell, and Type: Corona a wide soft ring. Bubble Chain is built on bubble ghosts.

Inside the ghost. Ringing adds faint concentric rings just inside each ghost’s rim, and Ring Count sets how many. They are worked out per color channel, so they pick up colored fringes on their own. Bristle Density lays fine radial fibers across the ghosts and Bristle Scale sets how closely packed they are; Dandelion is the fibrous extreme. Center Brightness and Edge Brightness split each ghost into its interior and its rim. Lower the center for a rim-lit ring, or raise it above the edge for a hot center. Both at 100 leave the ghosts as they are.

Eclipse. Eclipse Size bites a disc out of each ghost, turning it into a crescent; 0 is off. Eclipse Position sets how far from the ghost’s center the bite sits, along the flare axis, and Eclipse Softness how soft its edge is. The bite flips to the other side for ghosts beyond the optical center, and each ghost’s bite varies a little in size and placement. Eclipse Noir is the crescent-heavy look.

Defocus. Defocus softens the whole flare as if the lens were out of focus. It widens the glow, the halo band, the streak and the ghost edges, softens the rays and spikes, and lowers their peaks to match. It sits in this group but acts on every element. Soft Portrait and Orchid Prism use it.

The first eight ghosts of the stack can each be designed by hand. Each has its own collapsed group, Ghost 1 through Ghost 8, numbered by distance from the light: Ghost 1 is the ghost nearest the light, and the numbers count outward along the trail. The eight groups are identical, so this page walks through Ghost 1; every dial has a twin of the same name, with its own number, in the other seven. A slot beyond Ghost Count does nothing. Edit Ghost is an older slot selector kept for saved projects and stays hidden.

Ghost 1 Enable hands that ghost to you. Turning it on changes nothing by itself: the ghost stays where the stack put it, at the same size, so you can see which one you’re about to edit. Then:

• Ghost 1 Position slides it along the light-to-center axis, as an offset from where it was, in percent of Ghost Spread.
• Ghost 1 Size sets its size directly, in percent of frame height like Ghost Size, with no Size Variation applied.
• Ghost 1 Brightness scales its level.
• Ghost 1 Type forces a ghost type (Aperture, Disc, Anamorphic, Bubble or Corona); Auto keeps the type drawn from the Ghost Design weights.
• Ghost 1 Use Color replaces the stack’s Ghost Color A and Ghost Color B palette with Ghost 1 Color for this ghost.
• Ghost 1 Rotation turns it, on top of Aperture Rotation.
• Ghost 1 Softness sets its edge softness directly, in place of the softening by distance.
• Ghost 1 Center Brightness and Ghost 1 Edge Brightness are this ghost’s own interior and rim split, as in Ghost Design.

Eclipse per ghost. Ghost 1 Eclipse Size bites into this ghost (0 is no bite) and Ghost 1 Eclipse Position sets how far the bite sits from its center. Ghost 1 Eclipse Sides shapes the bite: below 3 it is round, and 3 to 12 cuts a polygon, so a hexagon can bite into a round ghost. Ghost 1 Eclipse Count repeats the bite, up to eight times, in a ring around the ghost’s center, and Ghost 1 Eclipse Rotation spins that ring.

Shape. Ghost 1 Shape gives the ghost its own silhouette. Iris, the default, keeps the aperture polygon; the others are Circle, Star, Cross, Ring, Crescent, Capsule, Wedge, Triangle, Concave and Box. Ghost 1 Shape Detail is each shape’s own second control: how deep a star’s points cut (a star takes its point count from Blade Count), how wide a cross’s arms are, the size of a ring’s hole, the offset of a crescent’s cut, a capsule’s thickness, a wedge’s opening, a triangle’s base, the corner bite of Concave and the corner rounding of Box. Ghost 1 Shape Aspect stretches the shape wider or taller (100 is even), and sets a capsule’s length. Hollowness draws an outline of whatever shape is set, so a hollow star is a star outline.

Shape is the one setting that works without Ghost 1 Enable: it reshapes the ghost at that place in the trail either way, which is how presets such as Starlit Wake, Glass Lattice and Crescent Tide carry shaped ghosts. Apart from shape, presets and Randomize leave the slots alone, so your hand-placed ghosts survive a preset change. A slot with an active texture (see Ghost Textures) draws the texture instead of the shape.

Textures swap a slot ghost’s drawn outline for a pattern: one of twelve built-in patterns, or your own image. Each of the eight slots has one popup here, Ghost 1 Texture through Ghost 8 Texture, matching the groups in Ghost Slots. A texture only shows on a slot whose Enable checkbox (Ghost 1 Enable and its twins) is on; the other ghosts in the stack never take one.

The texture replaces only the outline. The slot’s color, brightness, rotation, eclipse and the rest still apply on top, and Chromatic Fringe still splits it by color. None keeps the normal shape. The built-in patterns are Soft Disc (a plain soft falloff, the blank canvas), Onion Rings (concentric rings), Droplet Field (droplet specks over a soft disc), Ridge Band (a corrugated diagonal band), Bokeh Orb (a rim-bright orb with an offset dark patch), Split Lobes (two lobes joined by a thin bright bridge), Crescent Spike (a crescent fused with a spike), Anchored Burst (an off-center spike fan with a one-sided trail), Vapor (a cloudy patch), Spoke Burst (radial spokes), Ripple (damped concentric rings) and Sparkle Field (hot glints in a dim haze).

Texture Detail is each pattern’s structure control, such as how many rings, specks or spokes it has, and is shared by all eight slots. Texture Seed redraws the random parts of the patterns; New Seeds changes it along with the other seeds. Custom Layer uses the layer picked in Texture Layer, and that layer’s brightness becomes the ghost’s coverage: white is solid, black is empty. Large images are reduced to 1024 pixels on the long side.

Textures render bright. Strongly structured patterns such as Onion Rings and Ripple look like pasted stickers at full level, so bring that slot down to around Ghost 1 Brightness 45–65. Presets never set textures.

Dirt on the front element, lit up by the flare. Unlike every other element, dirt lives in screen space: it is one layer over the whole frame, not something attached to a light. It only appears while a light is on, and it shows most near the lights, the way smudges on real glass catch a bright source.

Dirt Amount is the level, and its default of 0 switches dirt off. Keep it low: around 30 is usually plenty, and much higher values read as an overlay rather than glass. Dirt Type picks the pattern: Specks (fine dust), Smudge Bokeh (large soft oily blobs), Scratch Field (fine directional scratches), Radial Burst (specks bursting out from one point), Swirl (a circular smear), or Custom Layer, which uses the layer picked in Dirt Layer. Dirt Scale sizes the pattern and Dirt Seed redraws it; New Seeds changes it too.

Dirt Illumination decides how much the dirt depends on the lights. At 0 it shows evenly across the frame, at 100 it shows only where a light is near, and the default 60 sits in between. Global Tint colors the dirt along with the rest of the flare; Hue Shift does not.

Presets never set dirt, and picking a preset leaves your dirt as it is. Dirt Trim in the Master group rides Dirt Amount when you want to mix it from there.

The wide ring element around the light — the faint circle a lens throws when a bright source is in frame. It rides on Light Position rather than on the optical axis, so it stays wrapped around the source no matter where in frame the light sits. It’s the quietest element and the one that most reliably makes a flare feel like it belongs to a real piece of glass, because it’s the artifact audiences never consciously notice.

Halo Intensity sets its level; the default 35 sits it under everything else, which is where it belongs on footage. Halo Radius sizes the ring and Halo Width sets how thick a band it is — a narrow ring at Halo Width 4–8 reads as a hard optical circle, while Halo Width 15–25 spreads it into an ambient wash that behaves more like a second, wider glow.

Halo Dispersion is the group’s character dial. It spreads the ring into its spectrum, so the band goes from a single-color circle at 0 to a full prismatic ring at 100. The default 25 gives a hint of color separation without turning the shot into a rainbow. Push Halo Dispersion to 90–100 with a raised Halo Intensity and the ring becomes the hero element — that’s the whole idea behind the Emerald Ring preset. Halo Color tints the ring; leave it white to let dispersion do the coloring, and set it when you want the ring to belong to a specific palette.

Gradient. Halo Inner Color and Halo Outer Color run a color gradient across the ring’s width, from its inner edge to its outer edge. Both multiply Halo Color, so with both left white the ring stays a single color. Halo Gradient Bias moves where the blend happens: 1 is even, and values away from 1 push the blend toward one edge or the other.

Shape. Halo Sides turns the ring into a polygon. Below 3 it stays a circle; 3–12 follows a polygon outline with that many sides, the same way the ghosts follow Blade Count. Halo Shape Rotation turns the polygon and Halo Roundness blends its corners back toward a circle. Matching Halo Sides to Blade Count makes the halo and the ghosts read as one aperture, which is how Cold Digital and Copper Telephoto are built.

Arc. Halo Completion wipes the ring down to an arc: 100 is the full ring and lower values keep less of it. Halo Arc Feather softens the arc’s ends, in degrees, and Halo Shape Rotation also turns where the arc sits. Noon Sun keeps a 70 percent arc.

Breakup and echoes. Halo Breakup breaks the ring up around its circumference into an uneven, fibrous band, and Halo Breakup Scale sets how fine the pattern is; Dandelion pushes it to 90. Halo Echoes repeats the ring outward, up to four rings in all (1 is a single ring). Halo Echo Spacing sets the gap between them and Halo Echo Decay how much dimmer each is than the one before. Emerald Ring uses two.

Squash. Halo Squash flattens the ring across the streak axis into the oval halo of an anamorphic lens. 100 leaves it round; Anamorphic Blue squashes it to 55.

The horizontal bar of light through the source — the single most recognizable flare artifact there is, and the one to use most carefully, because it announces a specific kind of lens on a specific kind of production.

Streak Intensity defaults to 45, present but supporting. Streak Length is its reach across the frame: Streak Length 80–140 keeps the bar local to the light, while 170 and up runs it out toward the frame edges for the full widescreen read. Streak Thickness decides whether it’s a taut line or a soft band — Streak Thickness 0.6–1.2 is the tight, credible version, and pushing past 3 turns it into a horizontal smear that reads more like haze than like glass.

Streak Angle rotates the bar off horizontal. Leave it at 0 for the standard look; angle it to match a lens that’s been rigged on a dutch, or turn it fully vertical for a deliberately synthetic graphic. Streak Color is blue by default because that’s what the real thing does — the streak is the one element where a strong color cast is expected rather than suspicious. Dial Streak Intensity to 0 on any shot that should read as spherical rather than anamorphic; several presets do exactly that.

Streak Breakup beads the streak apart along its length, from the outer ends in, with a different pattern on each side of the light, and Streak Breakup Scale sets the bead size. Like the other breakups it moves with Breakup Stream. Ember Drift and Static Comet use it.

Soft, low-contrast blobs scattered off the light–center axis, rather than marching along it like the ghosts do. They’re the flare’s dirt layer: smudges, dust, and stray internal reflections that don’t obey the clean optical geometry. Almost nothing in a shot points at them, and their absence is exactly what makes a computed flare feel too tidy.

Blob Count sets how many there are and Blob Spread how far off the axis they wander — low spread keeps them loosely gathered around the flare’s own structure, high spread scatters them over the frame. Blob Size is their base scale and Blob Size Variation keeps them from matching; the default 60 already gives a convincingly uneven set.

Blob Intensity is the dial to respect. It defaults to 12 for a reason — this element works subliminally, and the moment blobs are clearly legible they stop reading as contamination and start reading as objects. Blob Intensity 10–20 is the working range for footage. Take it higher only on a deliberately filthy lens, and pair it with a raised Blob Count so the frame reads as grime rather than as a handful of misplaced circles.

This is the group that separates a flare living in a shot from a flare sitting on top of one. Point Occluder at a layer and the flare responds to what’s in front of the light: it dims as the source passes behind a blocker, and it blooms along the edge at the moment of crossing.

Reading the blocker. Occlude From decides what in the occluder layer counts as solid — Alpha for a matte or a 3D render with real transparency, Luma when a grayscale map describes the blockage, and Inverse Luma when the map is the other way around (dark = solid). Occlusion is how completely a blocked light is killed: at 100 the flare disappears entirely behind the blocker, and 60–85 leaves a residue, which is often more honest — light scatters around edges and thin blockers rarely extinguish a flare completely.

Sample Size sets how large an area around the light gets sampled to judge blockage. Small values respond to fine detail, so a chain-link fence or bare branches will strobe the flare frame by frame; larger values average over a wider patch and give a smoother, more gradual transition. Sample Size 6–10 handles most hard-edged blockers. Response bends the curve between fully open and fully blocked: below 1 the flare dies quickly as soon as anything intrudes, above 1 it holds on and then drops off late. Reach for Response 1.5–2.5 when a light passing behind a soft edge should fight before it goes out. Occlusion Breakup makes the light sputter as it slips behind the blocker: the more of the light is covered, the more the rays, spikes and streak break into beads (on top of their own breakup settings), and the sputter starts slightly ahead of the dimming. It does nothing without an Occluder, and nothing while the light is fully clear.

The edge bloom. This is the payoff. As the light crosses the occluder’s edge, Edge Bloom fires a burst of diffraction along that boundary — the flaring fringe you get in real footage the instant the sun clears a ridge or a head crosses a lamp. Edge Bloom defaults to 120 because the moment deserves to be loud. Bloom Reach sets how far the burst extends from the edge and Bloom Softness how hard-edged it is; low softness gives a crisp rim, high values a broad flush along the boundary. Bloom Chroma adds spectral separation to it; the default 15 gives the fringe a light tint, and higher values push it toward a rainbow edge. Bloom Color tints the burst on top of that; leave it white unless the crossing needs to match a specific source.

Frame edges. Frame Edge Fade handles the other kind of occlusion: the light leaving frame. At 0 the flare simply cuts off at the boundary, which is correct if the light never approaches an edge. Raise it and the flare fades out as Light Position nears the frame edge, killing the hard pop a flare otherwise shows when its source exits — Frame Edge Fade 60–90 on any shot where the light travels off-screen. Frame Fade Feather sets how wide that fade zone is; widen it toward 20–30 for a slow, gradual exit on a long camera move.

Audio Drive lets a sound layer play the flare. Set Audio Layer to any layer in the comp that carries audio, choose what to listen to and what it moves, and the effect follows the track with no keyframes. The group sits collapsed at the bottom of the effect. With Audio Layer set to None, or Drive Amount at 0, it does nothing at all and the effect renders exactly as it would without it.

What it hears. Listen To picks the part of the sound that does the driving. Loudness follows the overall level. Hits reacts to transients such as drum hits and impacts, and a strong hit pulses harder than a soft one. Bass, Low Mids, Mids, Highs and Air each follow one frequency band (roughly 20 to 120 Hz, 120 to 500 Hz, 500 Hz to 2 kHz, 2 to 8 kHz and 8 to 20 kHz). The drive hears the layer’s audio where it sits in the timeline, following the layer’s start time and any time stretch, but it ignores time remapping, trims, Levels and audio effects on that layer. So turning a layer down in the mix does not weaken the drive.

Shaping the signal. For Loudness and the bands, the level becomes a signal between two marks. Audio Threshold is the floor in dB: anything quieter reads as nothing. Audio Range is how many dB above the floor it takes to reach full signal. The defaults (a floor of -40 dB and a range of 40 dB) spread the whole swing from -40 dB up to 0 dB. Raise the floor to ignore room noise or quiet passages, and narrow the range for a jumpier reaction. Audio Attack and Audio Release, in milliseconds, set how fast the signal rises and falls; the defaults (10 and 180) rise quickly and fall back more slowly.

For Hits, Hit Threshold sets how far a transient has to stand out from the surrounding audio to count, so higher values keep only the strongest hits. Hit Decay is how long each hit’s pulse takes to fade, in milliseconds. Audio Sync Offset slides the reaction against the picture, in milliseconds: positive values make the picture react later, negative values earlier.

How hard it pushes. Drives picks the target and Drive Amount sets the depth. At the default 100, the target swings from zero in silence to twice its dialed value at full signal, passing through the value you dialed halfway. Lower amounts narrow that swing around your value, higher amounts widen it, and negative amounts flip it, so the target drops as the sound gets louder (a ducking effect). For Twist and Lens Shake the amount works differently, as described below.

What it moves. Brightness rides Master Amount, Scale rides Master Scale and Complexity rides Master Complexity, so the whole flare breathes, grows or fills in with the sound while keeping its balance. Glow Trim, Ray Trim and Ghost Trim ride those element trims for a more selective push, such as a kick on the core glow and a hi-hat on the ghosts.

Two targets move the flare instead of scaling it. Twist turns the rays and the starburst with the signal, up to 30 degrees at full signal with Drive Amount at its default. Lens Shake jitters the Optical Center, and with it the ghost train, by up to 4 percent of the frame height at the same setting, in a quick random pattern that always settles back to where you placed it. Both are exactly zero in silence, and a negative amount turns or shakes the other way. There is no speed target: varying a rate with the audio would make the animation jump.

More than one driver. Add Driver opens another driver inside the group, up to four in all, so one track can drive several things at once. A second driver has its own Listen To 2, Drives 2 and Drive Amount 2, plus a collapsed Response 2 group with its own Audio Threshold 2, Audio Range 2, Audio Attack 2, Audio Release 2, Hit Threshold 2 and Hit Decay 2. Drivers 3 and 4 repeat the same set with their own number. Remove Driver takes the last driver away. Every driver shares the Audio Layer and the Audio Sync Offset. Two drivers on the same scaling target multiply their effects. Drivers on Twist or Lens Shake add together instead, and each driver on Lens Shake shakes in its own pattern. The number of open drivers is kept in a hidden Drivers setting that the two buttons change for you.

Each frame works out its drive from the audio around it, so scrubbing, rendering in order or rendering out of order all give the same result.