[John Cuevas]

Would require an expression and a little bit more detail(what’s the opacity when one of the sliders is 50, 75, 20)…Try the Expressions Forumm and be as detailed as possible to what you are trying to achieve.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

If they are paths in .AI file, you can open them up in Illustrator, select them & copy them and then switch to AE and paste them on to a solid—they will paste as individual masks.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

Pretty sure they used a conveyor under the talent and had her sing and dance on top of it. I can’t be sure, but the conveyor belt itself might be green and keyed out and a sidewalk texture was put on top of it.

This could be faked with a green screen and motion tracking, but if you are knew to AE, it would be pretty difficult to pull off. For example you could have to a person walk in front of a green screen, track person, and then reverse the track so the person stays in the exact middle of the screen. Then you would need to animate a floor moving beneath the person.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

Autofade

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

Aharon Rabinowitz did a pretty good tutorial on weather replacement(creating a storm) where he creates some onscreen distant lighting, you might find it useful. Weather Replacement

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

Are you locked into FLV as a deliverable? We only use them for our preview site, and even for clients who are going to put videos on the web, they usually want H.264.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

If have AECC, then this will probably go a long way to helping you create your desired effect: Rigid Mask Tracker,

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

I think if I were going to go that route. Instead of 2 perfectly mirrored text’s, I’d blur one, perhaps fade it off a bit as it got away from the connect point to make it look more like a soft reflection, rather than the approach you took.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

Set up your two pieces of video where you want your cut. Add an adjustment layer and add the effect Distort>Transform and set the scale to 150. Now just add a couple of moving masks to the adjustment layer over about 1 second duration. Here’s a quick example project I made demonstrating the technique: 6778_transformscalewipefolder.zip

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

I think using the numbers effect and just keyframe the numbers and uncheck proportional spacing and you should be good to go. One think about the number effect is when you turn off decimals, it rounds the result. For instance if you had a 60 second composition and you wanted to countdown from 60 to 0, you would need to start at 60.5 and go to 0.

Another more accurate way to do this would be to use a counting expression. I got this from Dan Ebberts int the expressions forum. First create a new comp the length you need to countdown and create a text layer by pressing “cntl+alt+shift+T”. Twirl open the empty text, twirl open text and “alt+click” Source Text and paste the following(to adjust your countdown adjust the clockStart variable):

rate = -1;
clockStart = 60;

function padZero(n){
if (n < 10) return "0" + n else return "" + n
}

clockTime = Math.max(clockStart + rate*(time - inPoint),0);

t = Math.floor(clockTime);
min = Math.floor((t%3600)/60);
sec = Math.floor(t%60);
min + ":" + padZero(sec)

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.