Vegas Plugin, that's really awesome, you can create running lights, some sweep lights and yeh our Fireflies in this example.
I will not go much into the detail of the fireflies, but I will try not to just let something fly around. The purpose of the tutorial is to show you the basics of the vegas plugin.

Step 1:
- As always create a new project 320x240 with a duration of 5 seconds.
- Ensure that your background is black. (fireflies just come out at night) hehe
"CTRL-SHIFT-B" is the shortcut for the background color
- Create a new solid (CTRL-Y) and get a grab of your pentool.
- Create some dizzy lines like I've done here:


Do you have it? Cool!!!

Next Step will be the creation of the fireflies or let's say the usage of the Vegas effect.

Step 2:
- Select your newly created layer and apply the Vegas Effect (Effects - Render - Vegas).
Not seeing anything? Don't worry, just 2 more small things till you can see something.

- First of all we need to tell vegas that he should follow the maskpath we created, that is being done by selecting mask/path on the Stroke option.
Second thing we need to define is the mask where vegas should work on, since we've created just one mask, that one is already active.
Here a screenshot of my settings:


Still not seeing anything? Then just click somewhere outside of the layer on the monitor window to deselect the mask.

:o) you got it.. there is our small lightglow

Now let's fine tune the effect properly

Step 3:
Open the Segments drop down and change following:
"Segments" since we just have 1 line, we will use a value of 1. If you would create a runninglight sign, you would put as many segments as lights.
"Length" and fireflies are not looking like lightsweeps.. or are they? no, so let's reduce the length of it to.. let's say 0.01.

Open the Rendering dropdown and change this:
"Width" doesn't need an explanation, it's the width of the firefly, I gave mine a width of 8.
"Color" hmm.. yeh.. select the color you want, I've chosen White
Leave the other settings as they are or play around with it, that's the way of learning it.

I don't think you are completely lost but just for any case here the screenshot of my settings:


If you deselect the layer again, you will see the result.


Where's the movement?

Step 4:
Hit the "home" key on your keyboard to ensure that your playhead is at the beginning of the timeline.
- Press the small stopwatch Icon on the left of "rotation". That creates a keyframe at the beginning.
- Hit the "end" key to jump to the last frame of the timeline and give the rotation a value of -2
Why a - value? Because I want that my Firefly goes counterclockwise, if you want that it moves clockwise just put a positive value.
Again a screenshot of the setting I've used:

playhead located at 01.20sec

If you a RAM preview now you will see that our Firefly is moving around the screen. That was easy..

If you want to create more fireflies, just repeat the steps mentioned above a few more times to get a lot more of fireflies swirling around.

In my example I've just used 3 layers.
And as you probably noticed, everytime a fireflie crosses the maskpath it switches off.
Just adjust the screenmode of every layer to "Add" and the problem is fixed.



That's it folks..

HERE the link to my AVI file so you can get an idea of that we've done, if you didn't made it till the end, what I hardly believe