Hail Mary Light Trails Built With the invideo Editor Agent

Headlights, taillights, neon and underglow that stretch into light trails on every drift, built as one custom shader on my own footage.

This is my entry for the invideo Editor Challenge on Contra. The footage and the anime look are mine. The light trails were built by the invideo Editor timeline agent, directed and checked by me.

Public timeline https://invideo.io/share/Detroit-Legend-Redline-AjiWHI7GHUg

A 58 second process film with voiceover, showing the agent at work and the before and after. The trails stretch long and hot on the song's seven drops and stay short on the straights.

Research the Hail Mary highlight trail effect and build it as one custom shader. Trails only on lights, no colour treatment, with controls for threshold, softness, length, direction, taper and mix.

Raise the threshold so tire smoke stays out, turn the trails sideways so the car drags its lights through the slide, and put the effect on a Screen layer over a clean plate.

Shape it to the song. The agent found the real downbeats (9, 32, 48, 68, 92, 108 and 128 seconds in) and keyframed trail length and mix on them.

Stop the white smoke from smearing. It added a spot size gate, checked its own frames, saw it wasn't clean yet and rebuilt it as a two scale gate.

Smooth the stepped look in the long trails and give car lamps more gain than the neon.

Trail taper from 2.0 to 1.2 so the streaks carry further, and lamp gain from 1.4 to 1.6 so the car lights lead. I checked every pass frame by frame and sent it back when the trails were too faint, landed early or caught the smoke.

All effect building and the final timeline happened in invideo Editor. Outside tools were used only for the screen recording and to cut the process film together.

Music is Detroit Legend by Freeway Fee, prod. Samurai BLAQUE.

Want effects work like this on your footage? admin@givemeprompts.com

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