[David Bogie]

No idea what you’re seeing in your head but you could precompose the earth thingy, put a border around it (using any of many different techniques), and nest it into a host comp.Do your scaling in the host comp which should simulate a zoom effect. The resolution will be no better than the original earth image, though.
bogiesan

[David Bogie]

“invisible box”? Do you mean the particles disappear at te edges of the layer? You need to apply the filter to a larger layer.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

My pleasure.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

there are two ways to do that.
You can bring the light in at an oblique angle.
You can place a layer in front of it that works as a mask, or, more properly, what we in the stage lighting industry would call a gobo. You can also use a layer to project a stained glass effect onto surfaces that will accept shadows.
These processes of placing object sin front of a light and chinging the transmission properties of the object aer covered in the AE manual. Look in the light sections.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Warning: Just because the slides can be exported as QT does not mean they’ll look good as video.
My experience with moving PP to video is that almost every slide has to be rebuilt from scratch. Two reasons: The person who created the PP is an idiot and the resolution of video is fixed whereas the rez of the PP/Keynote is variable.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

[johnsabbath d’urzo] “i searched and some say it will work but only on one processor and some say it will not power pc programs will not work.”

There is your answer: “No.”
Logically, any question that cannot return an answer of YES for every test has a steady state of NO.

If “no” is not good enough for you, you buy the machine and find out for youself.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Best to check with Adobe’s marketing site for AE and run a search on the AE forum at Adobe. Don’t just post the question, try searching first since you’ve already posted it here.

Should work fine if it will work in OS10. If you need OS9, all bets are off. Time to upgrade, you’re going to love CS4.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

I did not mean to suggest AE’s Shatter is your solution. I was trying to find out if you knoew how to use Boris’s Shatter, I do not. There are no ground planes in Shatter, only a few particle systems can be modified by, say, an alpha layer. I do not know if Boris can do it, Shatter cannot. Not in a single comp. You will build your rubble pile (which can be done in SHatter, sort of, by ramping up the Viscosity of the world’s air which will make the pieces come to a halt) and figure out a way to make a transition that adds the rubble.

Blowing up a building is fairly simple using Shatter and you can composite explosion and smoke movies inside and behind the Shatter layer to make it look fabulously realistic. The pieces can be blown away from the building and with excellent ballistics and they will fall with believable mass and gravity. But they will not interact with another layer or an alpha channel like Foam, CC Snow, or some of the Delerium filters.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

See the Boris forum?

if you were usingAE’s “Shatter” we might be able to help you directly.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

go to apple.com, look at the specs for FCS2. Print them.
Look at the specs for the mini. Print them.
Compare.

bogiesan