Next, you may want to saturate or desaturate the fire element to match your live footage. In this case, we need to desaturate the footage. Apply the Hue/Saturation effect (Effect>Color Correction>Hue/Saturation) and slide down the Master Saturation until it matches the footage. Here, I set the value to -56. Do this for both of your fire footage layers.

For the finishing touches, depending on the type of footage you have, you may want to add a little grain (Effect>Noise and Grain>Noise) or blur (Effect>Blur and Sharpen>Gaussian Blur) to match your live-action footage of the house. Here, I added a very small amount of Grain and set the Gaussian Blur level for both fire layers to 2.0. A plug-in that completely eliminates the flame transparency issues when using a transfer mode is the Walker FX package (www.digieffects.com/products/walkerFX). It creates an alpha channel from the black background, thus resolving the transparency issue.

Below is a picture of the results. Notice the transparency issue is resolved. You no longer need to add multiple layers of fire footage to fill in the transparent areas. At $149, it's a great deal! Thanks, Digieffects!

Your fire footage should blend pretty well with your background footage. Of course, there are no universal settings for these effects, due to different exposure settings, cameras, lighting conditions, etc., so experiment and find out what works best for your footage. Experimentation is key. Use this as a foundation for your own little tricks and techniques. Experiment, experiment, experiment! You'll be surprised at what you come up with. Be sure to check the online tutorial, and... oh.. the light saber FX? That's in an upcoming demo!

Paul Del Vecchio is a "do-it-all" director and owns Triple E Productions, a movie/video production company .

To view the tutorial video for Burning Down The House, click here