[Michael Szalapski]

What dimensions are we talking? How did we do the import/output? How much smaller is, “smaller”?

Like Dave said, we have absolutely no info about your issue with which to provide knowledgable assistance. I am also going to hazard a guess that something is weird in your Render Queue, probably that you’re rendering out at half resolution.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

Also, you might consider saving the ridiculous calls for assistance (heeeeelp!!!!) for when you are experiencing an error, a corrupted project, a crushing deadline, or something else similarly catastrophic.
Don’t use it for a simple “how did they do that?” query. I can’t speak for everyone here, but I am less likely to respond to requests like that. (I nearly didn’t respond to this one.)

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

Also, I should have mentioned Hue/Saturation as a good option too.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

There is a brightness effect on the lens flare, but you’re right; there’s no place to change the color.

Now, my following suggestions only work if your lens flare is on its own layer. So, if you haven’t already, create a comp-sized black solid, set its layer transfer mode to screen and apply the lens flare to the solid.

Apply Effect>Color Correction>Curves or Effect>Color Correction>Levels and change the channel drop down to something other than RGB and toy with them. Mixing that up will give you different colors. And working under RGB you can also adjust the brightness.

You can pretty much apply whatever other effect you want to. Perhaps Effect>Stylize>Glow

Honestly, play around.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

I can explain how it’s done very easily.
The camera moves forward. That’s it.
Or, more likely, all the objects in the comp are parented to a null and the null is animated to make the objects fly by the camera.

Check out Video Copilot.net for some great tutorials on the basics of AE that might help you.
Also, check through the tutorials here on the COW, there are several that are aimed at animating the camera.
And of course this link from Adobe is filled with great resources.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

It depends on what you’re doing. I did a weekly music and entertainment show that, barring the music videos we played and two other segments, was on a chromakey set. I edited it in Premiere then just imported the Premiere sequence into AE so I could key it, place the set (which, btw, was created entirely in AE) and do the color correction.

However, for a project I just did for the military, I created titles, graphics and lower thirds in AE, rendered them and imported them into Premiere. I used Premiere for the color correction.

It really depends on what you’re doing.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

Use Tint, Hue/Saturation, Channel Mixer (with the checkbox), or whatever your favorite method is, to turn your texture black and white.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

As Dave said, with good planning it won’t be too difficult. The hard part is the planning. Story boards are your friend. If you want things to pass in front of the person, you’ll have to either rotoscope them or have them green screened too. But that means planning what goes where and when.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

When you say the particles are jumping back, what do you mean?
It sounds like you’re saying that as you move through the timeline everything looks okay until you hit the second position keyframe on the null object and then the particles jump to a different position. Since all you’re animating is the null object, the particles can’t move back anywhere because they haven’t moved, it’s just the camera that’s moved.
Is your project any different from the one I’m attaching?
476_particleworldtest.aep.zip
(AE CS4 required)

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

Are you saying AE freezes at the 7-10 second mark during rendering in the render queue AND when playing back RAM previews?
What elements do you have in your comp?
What happens if you move the work area to render from the ten second point on?
Does this happen in all comps in all projects?

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.