[Michael Szalapski]

Or if you’re using an output format that allows it (such as Quicktime or a Targa image sequence), you can set it to render RGB+A in the render queue.

– 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]

Wait, what do you mean by creating a card?
If you mean you just want the person to be their own footage piece, then in the Render Queue settings make sure you’re rending RGB+A. Many formats will let you do this. Quicktime or a Targa Sequence would be good.
But you don’t even need to render them out first you could put each person in their own composition and place those comps in your main comp.

– 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]

Assuming I understand your issue Time Remapping is what you’re looking for.

– 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 could be done in AE.
It’s just a matter of duplicating a layer, cutting a ship out, placing that ship somewhere else and changing the color to make it look like it was further away.
Then do it for another ship.
And another.
And another.
Et cetera.
You will also need to rotoscope some of the front ships so the back ships appear to be behind them.
Basically lots of rotoscoping and/or keying.

– 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]

AE has several different ways to slow your footage down, and you can check some options to actually make it interpolate information between frames.

However, you will always get much better slow motion if you actually shoot at a higher frame rate. Most American video is 30 frames per second (or 60 interlaced frames). For good slow motion you want 120 fps or higher. Sometimes much higher, depending on what kind of stuff you’re shooting and how slow you want it to look.

When you say shot at 1/60th shutter speed I say that was a bad decision. A shutter speed that slow will very likely allow motion blur that will make any slow motion look terrible.

– 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]

HDV footage is compressed with the MPEG-2 compression scheme. That’s why it’s being captured as such.

Dave’s Stock Answer #1:

If the footage you imported into AE is any kind of the following —
footage in an HDV acquisition codec, MPEG1, MPEG2, mp4, m2t, H.261 or
H.264 — you need to convert it to a different codec.

These kinds of footage use temporal, or interframe compression. They
have keyframes at regular intervals, containing complete frame
information. However, the frames in between do NOT have complete
information. Interframe codecs toss out duplicated information.

In order to maintain peak rendering efficiency, AE needs complete
information for each and every frame. But because these kinds of footage
contain only partial information, AE freaks out, resulting in a wide
variety of problems.

Once you have your footage in Premiere edit it and then export what you want as a different kind of footage. Quicktime using the PNG codec is quite popular (NOT a PNG sequence).
Or you can encode your entire clip into your preferred format and edit it Premiere then do the dynamic link. To be honest, I’ve never found dynamic linking to work terribly well. I just import Premiere projects into AE and everything is awesome.

– 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]

Not being able to see it in motion makes it rather difficult to tell what’s going on. It looks like it could be done with Trapcode’s 3d Stroke or with a particle effect. The first image especially looks like they’re moving a particle emitter around with 0 velocity on the particles.

– 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]

You could use a displacement map driven by a precomposed layer with Turbulent Noise (or Fractal Noise). Then you would use another copy of that precomp to add in shadows and highlights. It would have to be tweaked and played with, but you could get a decent effect from it.

Or there’s always this.

– 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]

Asking the difference between After Effects and Premiere is like asking the difference between Word and Excel. Word is for word processing and Excel is for spreadsheets. Sure, you can write a letter in Excel and you can create tables and cells in Word to look like a spreadsheet, but why would you want to? They’re very different products intended for very different uses.

Same thing with Premiere and After Effects.

Dave said it right. You edit video and audio in Premiere. You do compositing and motion graphics in AE.

There are a bunch of effects in Premiere that can do some compositing and you can do quite a bit as far as motion graphics go, but it’s nothing like what you can do in AE.

Another way to look at it is AE is for animating and special effects while Premiere is for cutting.

At my job we usually do the editing in Premiere and then I bring the edited project into After Effects to do my magic on it.
Although, sometimes I create graphics in AE and give them to another editor to put into Premiere later.

– 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]

To duplicate the look, you wouldn’t need to go into AE at all. You could just do this in your NLE by taking little snippets of footage and copying and pasting it over and over.
You could do it in AE with Time remapping, split your layer so each wiggling part is separate and set your Time Remapping keyframes on your little piece and do a loopOut expression to repeat it over and over.

– 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.