[Keith Mcgregor]

Yeah, it would be best to do a final edit of footage with the music in FCP, realtime is so much faster than waiting for a preview. Then, when you render, make sure to render out a reference movie and drop that into AE. (No intermediate files here!) and all should be good to go in AE. When you render out of AE you won’t have to use a compressed version of the video and it should turn out as pretty as a picture!
As far as synch goes, there should be a small red box on your clips in the timeline when they are out of synch. If you right click over it you get the option to slip in synch with the audio track. If that’s all goofy then you will need to use the slip tool. The razor blade will do nothing to help synch, it is only for cutting.
Hope that helps,
-B

Reality? What did you make it?

[Keith Mcgregor]

You could try a couple of things. Maybe an animated lens flare (for the colors) and a white solid with an animated mask? How about an adjustment layer with glow or bloom animated to an insane amount and use a transfer mode to accentuate the colors or burning effect. Try ’em, they might work.
-B

Reality? What did you make it?

[Keith Mcgregor]

If there’s anyway you could get stock footage of flames (istock, HD cuts?, getty images, etc. etc.) being moved in the air, you could just track the motion of the ball and use a displacement map to make it look like it’s kinda wrapped around the ball. Bezier warp might do as well. About transfer modes, maybe ADD with the opacity turned down might do. But I would actually have to try it with the baseball footage. You will have to adjust it’s path until it looks right, but sounds like fun to me!
Hope that helps, -B

Reality? What did you make it?

[Keith Mcgregor]

Have you tried animating a stroke on a path? Otherwise you could try to figure out how to animate a ramp (in Maya) that is on the same animation path as the star (or object) and add the glow in AE.
Maybe?
-B

Reality? What did you make it?