[Joshua Mason]

AE has a feature called “time remapping”. If you are using AE 7.0, right click on your video footage in the timeline window and go to “time>enable time remapping”. This creates two initial keyframes: one and the begining of your footage(representing the first frame of your footage), and one at the end(representing the last frame of your footage).

Now all you have to do is find the point in time you want to slow down, and create a new keyframe. Then commence to adjusting your time until you are satisfied.

I hope this is helpful and not too vague.

-Josh

[Joshua Mason]

You might be able to create a mask on the floor and then feather it until it blends well. Or another idea might be to tighten the depth of field on your comp camera so that the background goes out of focus and blends together. I’m not sure if that helps or not,(or if you’ve already tried that).

[Joshua Mason]

This seems like and aweful lot of trouble just for a burning fuse. You should try to do everything in AE. You don’t have to use the stroke effect. If it’s just a simple project you can use a solid layer for the fuse. If your comp size is 720 x 480, I would suggest a solid layer of 600 x 10, or something like that. You can even throw a rope texture on it if you want.

Then just animate your mask shape to make it disapear as it burns.

Then you just import your footage and place it underneath your animation, and that way you can adjust the duration of your fuse to match your video.

I hope this helps. Sorry if I may have left out a few important details. This is my first post.

-Josh