Issue with Lense Flare Fading

Question

Hello all,
I am having an issue with a lense flare not fading properly but let me first explain my project. I have used photoshop to create a planet (my first one so its not that great) and now have reduced it to a few crusial layers and have imported it into After Effects to animate a few things. One of the things I am animating is two lense flares which are essentiall stars in a solar system. I have created these in Photoshop and moved them over into After Effects. One of the animations I want to give them is a pulsing, glimmering look as well as a rotation. I have applied a CC Light Rays filter to each flare, then centerd it and key framed the intensity and radius. At first these were causing some issues – when the intensity and especially the radius were set to high (over 100 for intensity and 50 for radius), the layer didnt fade into the background because of the brighness of the flare being too intense for a gradual fade to transparenncy. The blending mode of these flare layers in Linear Dodge and I have tried screen, it gives me the look I'm after but it seems that this problem persists on all blending options. So... What I did was reduce the values for intensity and radius on the CC Light Rays filter and that helped out some; however, when I key framed a rotations for the layer, the layer is easily visiable and this problem is just as bad as before. I though that adding an eliptical mask (a circle) around the flare would hide this ungly box–look but it doesn't hide it. My question is how do I get rid of this? Is there another way to mask it or remove it?
I have uploaded a ten second clip of my current work here, please watch it full screen and high quality to see it better: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XA9ewVs-x14&feature=youtu.be
Mind you the green flare is actually two flares – a static Photoshop generated one which is below the one I'm wanting to fix.
Document size is 1680x1050
Any and all help would be much appriciated.
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I don't know, man, I used 8bit effects for decades and loved 'em. But that's another thread.
Screen only makes the blacks go away but that diminishes the grays and chroma. Flares always benefit from a free bit of kit from (I think) Red Giant called Knoll UnMult. What it does is transfer the blacks to the alpha and you will get deliciously slick flares. I'd be surprised if that doesn't solve you issue.
You can also do a quick search on viemo for AE tutorials featuring flares. This has all been done a billion times.
Message was edited by: bogiesan