You can also add additional Blur effects to soften the flash if it seems too sharp. If your footage has a decent amount of motion blur, use the Zoom Blur effect to replicate this in your muzzle flash, setting the Center Position behind the flash. We used three different Heat Distortion effects, each with a different Scale, Noise Speed, and Distortion setting, to add variation to the flash’s appearance and enhance the details. Step 3: Fine-tune the muzzle flash appearance If your footage frame rate is around 24 to 30 fps, each muzzle flash should appear for a single frame.Īs we want the flash to look different every time it appears, animate the Seed property over the whole shot. Animate the Active property, so the muzzle flash appears on the correct frames.Adjust the scale to make the flash a realistic size.You may want to scrub the timeline to animate the rotation to ensure that the effect continues to align with the gun. In the preset’s Transform settings, adjust the flare’s 3D rotation to line up with the gun.Parent this preset layer to the Point layer.Position the flare to the gun’s muzzle.After dragging and dropping the preset into your composite shot: We’ll use the Pistol (Low- Light) preset to create the muzzle flashes for our prop pistol gun. Furthermore, the effect is entirely customizable, helping you achieve that desired look. The Gunfire effect is fully 3D, allowing the muzzle flash effects to better align with your shot. To counter this problem, we’ll use HitFilm’s Gunfire effect. The traditional approach would be to use stock footage, but this technique is often limited by the angle the stock footage was shot. Now that we have tracked the footage, we can begin adding the gunfire effects. If your footage contains a rapid-firing gun requiring many muzzle flashes, HitFilm’s motion tracking tools would be better suited to track the tip of the gun automatically. Ensure that the keyframes are of the type Constant. Repeat this for the rest of the gunshots. Then, scrub the timeline to the next frame that the gun is fired and reposition the Point. Enable keyframing for the Point’s position so it can be animated. Then, add a new Point layer to the Composite Shot, positioning it over the gun’s muzzle. Step 1: Tracking your muzzle flash effectsįirst, after making your footage a Composite Shot, move the Playhead to the frame you want the muzzle flash effects to appear.