[Michael Szalapski]

The swirly/swoopy light thing seems to have been popular ever since TNT did their graphics package. It’s shown up on two of the four major networks. ABC incorperated the water droplets they had going before so it’s not quite as bad a ripoff as that OTHER NETWORK.

Of course, it could be argued they’re all influenced by the iPod commercial with the swirly light following the iPod in the hands of the dancers.

But that’s a discussion for another day.
Here’s a tutorial that will help. It’s based on TNT’s graphics.

– 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 are several ways you can achieve this. Practically almost always looks better than something attempted in post. However, the roadrunner effect isn’t particularly realistic, so it’s often difficult to achieve without digital effects.

The first thing I would look into, if I were you, would be various particle effects. CC Particle World might be a good start. Some particle effects such as Trapcode’s Particular (my favorite AE particle effect) come with smoke/cloud-shaped particles, but in other cases, you’ll have to create 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]

I agree with Kevin.
Also, I have had good success with 3d Flag as well. You can make it look really good.

I have had odd things happen with several of Zax’ products with multiprocessing on, but with it off everything works fine.

– 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]

Convert your footage to a codec that doesn’t use interframe compression. From Dave LaRonde:

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.

Some popular options are Quicktime movie using the PNG codec or targa image sequences.

– 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]

A search for city aerial on Artbeats’ website pulls up quite a bit.

– 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]

Is there any footage in your project? If any of it’s HD, you’ll want to see Dave LaRonde’s stock answer on HDV footage issues. (Basically, don’t use it; transcode it into a different format)

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.

Also, are you trying to use multiprocessing? If so, you need more RAM. AE needs at least 2 Gb per core and remember Windows eats up a lot of RAM by itself, plus all the other programs (anti-virus, etc.) take some up 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]

Fractal noise wouldn’t be my first choice for simulating video noise or film grain, but if it’s working for you; great!
If I had to make it look video there are several things I would try. This is just shooting in the dark and guessing, ’cause I haven’t seen an example of the shot, but here goes:

You’ve already mentioned adding a bit of noise with fractal noise, but you might consider using one of the grain effects instead. They’re made to actually simulate different film stocks.

Depending on what kind of video you’re attempting to emulate, play with the color correction tools to try to give it less dynamic range. Two instances of levels, one to add more contrast to the point of losing a bit of detail on the highs and lows and another to bring it back to normal but now with less detail.

Save your jpeg out of Photoshop (or whatever you use to edit such things) as the final pixel size of your comp; don’t scale it down in AE. You might even consider saving it a few pixels smaller and scaling it up a touch in AE, again depending on what sort of source you’re attempting to emulate.

Add a bit of motion to the scene. Light playing on the window, a fly buzzing through the scene, curtains moving with the slightest hint of a breeze from the vent, dust particles in sunlight…that sort of thing. Rarely is a room truly still.

If there’s fluorescent lighting in the room, perhaps a bit of randomness and flickering in the light would help. (Done using a wiggle expression on the opacity of an adjustment layer with a levels effect, perhaps.)

Put a very subtle wiggle on the camera so it’s not perfectly still. Just a touch though, subtlety is key.

Audio! Realistic room sound will go a long way to sell the effect.

HOWEVER: I’m a big fan of doing things practically. Save your picture out of Photoshop at the proper final size and output it from Premiere or Final Cut (or whatever) onto DV tape (or whatever type of media you’re trying to emulate) then recapture from the tape onto your machine. So, for example you’re trying to copy the look of DV tape, you’ll be nearly there in one step! Putting it onto tape will lose the color info and add the noise that 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]

Back in your original post you said “I have a well lit green screen…”
Sorry. No you don’t. I see Dean’s already explained it very well, so I won’t go into it too, but bud…you need a green screen that’s actually green.

– 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]

Perhaps this is a dumb question, but what is it a picture OF?

Also, how do you plan to use Fractal Noise to make it look like video?

– 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]

If you’re looking to track shots into a 3d scene with camera movement you can try the tracker in AE or Mocha (which ships with AE CS4, but if there’s too much 3d motion, you’re going to need to look into proper 3d tracers like Boujou, Synth Eyes, Icarus, etc.

– 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.