[Michael Szalapski]

Make the composition that contains Form and your image layer the same size as your main composition.

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

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[Michael Szalapski]

That second method caused an expletive to come out of my mouth (an infrequent occurrence for me). I love it; it’s so elegantly simple (your method; not my cussing).

– 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]

Yes. It is possible.

What part of it are you curious about?

– 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 don’t watch MTV and many of our contributors here on the COW live in other countries where MTV’s branding may be different. So without an example posted I’m going to have to guess.

I agree with Steve that you can probably do something with shape layers, etc.

I would also suggest you might be able to do something with the Distort>Polar Coordinates filter.

– 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’m saying you could achieve this several different ways.

You could certainly do it with several layers of particle effects. Just keyframe the emitter to point up and down with wind or gravity set to go to the right.
Or alternatively, you could do it this way.

You could do it with a displacement map following some of the techniques in this old tutorial.

Or you could toy with this series of old tutorials. Part one, part 2, part 3

To be honest, you could even do that with several solids at partial opacity with animated, feathered masks.

I’m sure others could think of even more ways.

– 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 don’t know if you’re still dealing with this, but I found another resource for you, that will help with distributing layers in a circle.

– 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]

Robbie’s advice is for editing in Premiere only. That will not work for After Effects.
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.

So edit in Premiere than output it as a type of file that does not use Interframe compression. It’s been discussed fairly often on the AE forum and people have suggested a few different things, such as Quicktime using the PNG codec.
So, when it comes to using your HD footage in AE and you’ve got questions, chances are someone else has asked it. So come on over to the AE forums and search on there.

– 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 don’t know the answer and I’ve never used Motion before, but you might consider posting in the actual Motion forum.

– 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 don’t know about famous movies, but you might try looking at Digital Juice’s Compositor’s Toolkit. Their promotional materials have several videos that demonstrate compositing with layers flying out in 3d space to show how they’re stacked on each other, 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.

[Michael Szalapski]

You might try looking at Digital Juice’s Compositor’s Toolkit. Their promotional materials have several videos that demonstrate compositing with layers flying out in 3d space to show how they’re stacked on each other, 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.