If your video includes New Year scenes or celebration moments, you may need fireworks effects and sounds. Download over 300s free fireworks videos, overlays, SFX and enhance your scenes.
Fireworks effects, bokeh, smoke are all familiar attributes of major celebrations. Whether it’s New Year’s celebrations or national holidays, fireworks is an indication of the magnitude of the event. To bring such an effect into your video edit, you can create such effects on your own (longer but sweeter) or you can download free fireworks effects and sounds and use them as transitions, b-rolls, overlays, audio. You can also pay a licensing fee if you don’t like free assets (it’s your money, after all!).
In our story about fireworks, smoke, bokeh effects for video we’re talking about two approaches: create such effects by yourself of download ready-made videos for free (or a fee). Let’s explore these two ways below.
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Create fireworks and smoke effects
In this tutorial you can learn how to create fireworks and smoke effects on the cheap. Watch it attentively and remember that you’re dealing with explosive material, which can be dangerous. Still, creating your own fireworks and smoke effects is so fun.
Here are some important points to consider when you shoot your own firework effects:
- Use a telephoto lens for close-ups. This will help to keep yourself at a distance from the burning and exploding materials.
- Experiment with different frame rates and shutter speeds.
- Use metal sparklers for more consistent sparkling.
- Work with another person. You don’t want to manage the fireworks and the camera on your own.
- Have one person manage the fireworks while another person manages the camera gear.
- Check your local regulations and laws about how to handle explosives and fireworks in your area.
Types of fireworks
If you decide to shoot your own fireworks effects, take a look at the types of fireworks out there. Fireworks can be classified into several types depending on what patterns are created in the sky.
Spider-like effect: The lights create a fine lace in the sky.
Brocade effect: This effect is a silver tail effect in the dark sky. Long brocade tails are produced with glitter.
Flower effect: This aerial effect is self-explanatory: the lights take the flower-like shape.
Comet effect: this fireworks effect looks like a comet that breaks into multiple comets, which creates a cross shape.
Bright balls: this effect produced with bright balls flying through the sky and burning when they reach their maximum height.
Dragon eggs: a delayed crackle effect displayed in egg-shaped patterns.
Glowing embers: the embers following slowly in the air create a waterfall effect.
Download free fireworks and smoke effects
If your own fireworks effects and videos are too long of a process and you need stock footage and overlays, check out these free fireworks videos and effects. We’ve collected a collection of 300 video clips and effects that you can download for free.
25 free fireworks effects from Shutterstock
Shutterstock has a free collection of beautiful fireworks effects. In this footage collection you will find bokeh, fireworks, and smoke video clips. This is over 9 Gb of footage that you can download and use in personal and commercial projects.
85 free fireworks videos on Mixkit
Mixkit has over 70 free video clips featuring celebrations and fireworks (also, take a look at these 15 free pyrotechnics stock video clips). Check out this free video collection and download videos with one click. No signup is needed.
Throw in some free fireworks sound effects from Mixkit. These 11 free fireworks sounds will come in handy into your edit. The free sounds include the majority of use cases:
- Fireworks whooshes and bangs
- Multiple fireworks explosions
- Fireworks bang in sky
- Firework whoosh explosion
- Firework whoosh bangs
- Firework rockets exploding in the sky
- Clear firework explosions
- Fast whistle firework
- Small firework explosion
- Several whistle fireworks
200 free fireworks videos on Pexels
Pexels, a popular free image and video site, has over 200 free video clips with fireworks. Unfortunately, these videos are heavily compressed, which may not be convenient for projects going beyond social videos. This free video collection is still worth using in videos.
28 free firework sound effects on PremiumBeat
PremiumBeat, a popular royalty-free music site, has a great free SFX pack that includes 28 firework sounds. You will find firecracking and popping sounds in this free pack. Overall, you have access to 11 categories of free firework SFX in this pack. Here are the sounds:
How to use free fireworks effects in Premiere Pro
Using these free fireworks assets in Premiere Pro is straight-forward.
- Choose the firework effect to import
Import the firework element along with your footage in your project.
- Add it to the timeline
Place the firework or bokeh overlay above your footage.
- Blend the overlay with your footage
In the Edit tab, pick the Screen blend mode. See the screenshot below.
Using the fireworks or bokeh overlays in Final Cut Pro is similar to Premiere.
As for free firework sounds, you can use them as regular audio in your timeline.
How to use fireworks effects creatively
Like we mentioned above you can place a firework clip over your footage, then change the Blending Mode of the clip to something like Add or Screen. You can also combine several firework clips together, which can create a brand new look and an interesting effect. Here is a tutorial from PremiumBeat, a popular stock music site, about how you can use fireworks and bokeh effects creatively.
Need more free overlays for video? See the list of free video assets available on our site:
If you need more free assets, check out these small collections of free videos and sounds: