[Grant Swanson]

For windows or mac, without a doubt, you want to run a jpeg or another similar picture-per-frame sequence, for the BEST quality. However, the file sizes are gigantic, so unless you have a lot of hard drive or server, I would suggest using a quicktime movie with the ‘animation’ preset selected, the file size will still be relatively small, and you’ll barely notice a difference in quality.
Aharon Rabinowitz does a great job covering all sorts of video compression settings (not just for the web) in his COW Master Series DVD, “Internet Killed the Video Star.”

[Grant Swanson]

This technique may not be the most realistic way, but it certainly works. Create a solid , with the color of light you want to use. Put it behind the shattering footage, and change its (the solid’s) transparency to around 40-50%, although you’ll have to play with this setting. Next, apply the CC Radial Blur Effect, and play with the settings, until you get something you like. You will have to key frame the solid footage in order to make the solid disappear by the time you footage is completely shattered. Hope this helps!

[Grant Swanson]

The easiest way to do this would be to duplicate the footage, turn off the visibility for one of the layers, create a mask around yourself for the visible one, and then under the scale properties, unlink the x and y values, and just put a negative sign (-) before the y value.
Now just turn the other layer’s visibility back on, and move the masked layer into position.

Hope this helps!
-Grant Swanson

[Grant Swanson]

I think I understand what you’re trying to do. (Do you want the entire ring to lie flat, or each letter individually?)
To have the entire ring to lie flat, you need to copy your mask to the text layer, open up the options, text options, path options, and set the Path to “Mask 1” or whatever you named the mask. You’ll probably have to turn on the Reverse Path option and adjust the start and end point of the mask.
Now, just hit the 3D switch in the timeline to make the text layer a 3D layer, and adjust the X rotation.
Hope this helps!
-Grant Swanson

[Grant Swanson]

There are a few different probable causes to this. It’s just the way the two programs work with opacity, you just need to play around with the different values until you get something that looks good to you in FCP. Are the two systems both on the same computer? If not, when the video is being viewed on two different monitors, the opacity will appear as though it’s being set at two different levels. One last thing, I’m pretty sure you can adjust the photoshop opacity right in FCP, (in the Motion tab, I think). Hope this helps!
-Grant

[Grant Swanson]

You are running into this problem most likely because your memory is being fragmented before the render is completed. My guess is that After Effects was installed before the new memory was, and so After Effects is not recognizing all of your memory. Go to the After Effects–>Preferences menu, go to the “Memory & Cache” section and check the settings. Since After Effects still has to render out the entire 5760 x 3888 picture in each frame even though part of it may not be seen, the file size will be larger than most normal 720×480 video file sizes. So anyway, in the preferences settings make sure the Maximum Memory Usage is set to 120% and the Maximum RAM Cache Size for your 9 gigs should be set to something a little over one gig, around 1080 megabytes should be fine. Check: Enable Disk Cache Size and the set it to around 800 megabytes. Hope this helps!
-Grant

[Grant Swanson]

Are you on a Mac or PC? Are you able to play it in Quicktime at all on that workstation? (Outside of AE?) Most likely you are missing a codec. Try downloading a codec pack such as the ‘Cole2K Media Codec Pack.’ Hope this helps. -Grant