[David Bogie]

[Chris Wright] “you need to watch the mocha tutorials. tv’s look real because they keep the reflections of the walls. as for focal length, its not a big deal, mocha can automatically calculate the pinch amount. color correct the frame by taking a fake key and using its color match. the frame can be made using maltanonn’s extruder and texturized effect. match grain and flip the remote!
“

Great advice, Chris. Inferring form the OP, not sure he is up to these advanced tools. Shoot, I’ve been using AE for a l-o-n-g time and, even thought it looks like tremendous fun, I’ve never opened Mocha and have not heard of Multaanon’s Extruder. I have great respect for all of his wonderful tutorials and advice:
https://maltaannon.com/

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

The RAM is only for storing the calculated frames. Adding external RAM won’t increase the size of the preview movie.

RAM Preview movies can be saved to disk, that allows you to splice many of them together. However, I’m surprised at how often this “Ae can’t use all my RAM ” issue comes up around here and other forums. How do you suppose we all got along doing 2k (the frame size limit up until CS3 IIRC) previews when a couple megs of RAM were all a fiscally responsible shop could afford? Careful workflow preparation, prerendering, use of proxies, and a thorough understanding how to use the limitations of the tools we had at our disposal. the effort wasn’t trivial but it wasn’t difficult.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Precompose.
Place your photo into a much larger comp and peel the comp, not the photo.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

You’ll soon find that precomposing is the solution to 95% of your creative challenges in After Effects.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Bris 3D filters have a keyframable wrap function. However, it only rolls or unrolls the image from the sphere or cylinder. You still have to figure out how to get it to appear to peel.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Easier to reshoot it with the set and video playback carefully synched to the script. Or it would be far easier to reshoot with the set, or a propr frame, and fill the screen with your video track.

To do this convincingly, you must create a 3D room in AE and carefully place the camera in the same location and with the same lens with which you shot the scene. Then you can precompose a 3D frame (really hard to create in AE) and try to match the general look and feel of the location lighting and depth of field.

Lower your expectations

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Throw money and time at it.
Animating the text is easy.
Designing the moves and timing them are hard. Really hard.
Designing the enhancements, horns or splatters, takes even more time and is even harder.

as Paul says, the video tube sites are loaded with this kind of stuff. Search for “kinetic type” to get ten or fifteen thousand clips.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Ah, an iMac. Only one internal drive.
That’s the problem.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

There was a recent post on one of AE Tutorial sites about the effects wonks who shot Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Complete exposé about their tank effects. They used cold salt water floating on top of hot fresh water and then injected white latex paint (in various dilutions) between the two layers of water.
It was much more complicated than that.

I’ve shot lots of tank stuff but just with inks against white and white latex against black with various colored lights. It’s all about experimentation and lots of cleaning up. Never got into using fluids with different densities.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

[Jit Gohil] “I come from the Web Design world where we have well structured Typography, e.g. H1, H2, P “

Generally accepted conventions are not the same as well structured rules. 15 lines of text on a screen, including leading and descenders, establishes the minimum pixel height for legibility. Ther are many more things to consider when crafting text for video including the hairlines and descender thicknesses.

We have a large group of Web experts on our staff. Only one of them comprehends the art and craft of typography and she is rarely allowed to use that knowledge. Most of our Web content is designed by committee; “Heck, my 12-year old can create a Web site! How hard can it be?”

Same with video these days.

bogiesan