The Beam Effect is a simple way of producing fairly good looking blasters. The effect can look quite nice if you put some time into it. But it will probably never look quite as good as rendering the blasters in your favorite 3D modeler and using After Effects to just supply the glow. I'm not saying the Beam Effect is bad, it's just that it's limitations can sometimes make the effect pretty hard to get.

Now, on the good side, the Beam Effect is a really cool tool because it allows you to create and animate a really wild array of different effects. In this case, I'm going to concentrate on blaster shots coming from a Tie Fighter.

Here is the video I made with this tutorial. It's a 2 second clip of a Tie Fighter firing lots of shots.

Like always, I've supplied the raw video clip used for the tutorial to help you practice the effect. That will save you the trouble of having to create your own.
You can get that here: Download Example file
The example is an AVI in MSMPEG 4 CODEC.
If you do not have the MSMPEG4 CODEC, Click here to download it.
Instructions: Unzip into an empty directory (no spaces in the directory name), Right click on the file named "MPG4VKI.inf", click on Install.

I sincerely hope this is helpful to you!!

Please feel free to shoot me an email if you have any questions or suggestions.

Let's get started: Open After Effects