How do I create the Hail Mary light-trail effect on my footage?
Last updated September 30, 2026
Ask the invideo agent inside invideo Editor to stretch the brightest areas of your footage into soft directional trails. This creates the Hail Mary-style treatment as an effect on your existing shot, with controls for refining the look.
Provide a reference if you have a particular version in mind. An example request is: “Create soft trails from the brightest lights, extending to the right. Keep my existing colour treatment and leave the darker areas clear.”
The agent handles building and applying the effect. You can refine highlight threshold, softness, trail length, direction and mix where those controls are exposed. Threshold determines which bright areas contribute; mix controls how strongly the treatment appears over the original image.
Review the whole shot, since changing highlights can make the effect stronger in some frames than others. You can adjust the treatment without generating a replacement video.
See the official Hail Mary effect guide for the workflow.