Cheesey 70s lens flare with the Blender Compositor

I rendered out something I was working on and realized that I had got the lighting wrong. the material I was trying was quite reflective and during the animation the material burned out - I had over exposed hotspots. While I considered what I was going to do about the lighting I realised that what it really needed to make it look authentic was lens flare.

I thought I would try it in Aftereffects as I'm always conning myself that I will oneday learn Aftereffects, but the tutorials for that were either very bad or involved buying an expensive pluggin. Not doing that! So I returned to Blender. Most of the tutorials for Blender involved meticulously choreographing lens flares by hand and I wanted something automatic and easy. Also I was quite happy with smudgy anamorphic style lens flare rather than beautiful blobby nikon lens flare. So I decided to do it myself using the compositor.

Now with my 70s star filter node set up my humdrum dual control assembly suddenly becomes a luxurious and desirable item. Why not use it on all your renders ;)

The node set up is here:

enjoy