Starburst effect

[tricky]

Anyone know of a good technique to get a cheesy starburst effect with an image?

I expect a post process is the way to go, and I guess it willwork on certain levels of white above a certain threshold.

Any pointers?

[percydaman]

look up john knolls light factory.

[joconnell]

Hmm - Your best bet is knoll light or the frischluft plugins in after effects or photoshop which do indeed let you use brightness values to place flares or highlights. Knoll light has a handy plugin called spectacular that uses alpha channels for position information and rgb channels for colour values so you can render out an animation of your light sources and it'll automatically track a flare on to each.

[tricky]

I think Knoll is pretty pricey though, isn't it? We have Magic Bullet which is indeed very good and I think its by the same group. Will take a look.

[joconnell]

few hundred dollars? good with the exchange rate. If cost is an issue you could screen map your footage to a plane, use particle flow to birth particles based on grayscale values so it'll spawn more on the highlights then use facing particles with a little star map applied - render it black and white and comp it over.

[percydaman]

light factory is alot cheaper then sapphire if memory recalls. I thought it seemed pretty reasonable.

[charleyc]

Depending on how cheesy, there is a post effect in the Video Post called Lens Effect Highlight that does this. It gives you a lot of parameters over size, point number, color gradient and such but it is still pretty primitive compared to things like Saphire.

[tricky]

Had a look at the demo of Knoll for Photoshop - its a lot cheaper than I thought. However, it only appear to produce one 'sparkle' at a time. I wanted something a little more intelligent than that which could 'scan over my image and vary intensities of sparkles all over the place'.

Obviously asking a bit too much!!!!!