[Michael Szalapski]

If you have Trapcode’s Starglow plugin, this is the perfect time to use it. You can control the threshold of what gets affected.

If you don’t have it you can add lovely sparkle and shine in several ways.

You could do Effect>Stylize>Glow you can also choose what gets affected.

You could duplicate your layer, crush the levels to make most of it black except the lights, add a directional blur, and set the layer blending mode to screen. Then duplicate this layer and change the angle (and perhaps amount) of the blur.

You could also use a luma key of some kind to isolate the lights

To be honest screen blending mode, masks, luma keys, and any number of blurs and cor correction can achieve all kinds of different looks.

– 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]

Real quick note here; prosperity is spelled wrong.

– 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 no Windows 7 guru, but have you tried rebooting the machine?

– 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 going to take a guess here and say this HD footage is from an HD camera that uses DV tapes, i.e. HDV camera.

From the incomperable 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.

– 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 a number of distort plugins under effect>distort that can achieve the look you want. Nothing will distort anything in true 3d, but you can fake the perspective.
The first one that comes to mind is Bezier Warp. You could also use Reshape or maybe Mesh Warp. I suggest playing around with them and other plugins that are in that section and perhaps you’ll find a recipe that works for you.

– 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]

Here.

– 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]

Time remapping is your friend.

– 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 is very easy for a day to night shot to look fake, as has been previously mentioned.
I worked on color correction and special effects on a promo for a university that involved a super hero.
Don’t ask. (It actually turned out pretty cool and attracted a bunch more students to the university despite my doubts.)
In it, the director decided he wanted many shots done day for night.

The most riduculous shot, by far, was one that invovled a motorcycle being driven by a stunt guy going 85mph through the center of the campus. Ignoring the fact that the director needed the motorcyle changed from yellow to red, it was still a ridiculous D4N shot. The sky was in it, the camera was moving, there were several buildings with windows, over ten lampposts, and more!
I had well over 100 layers in that comp.
Each lamp required at least five layers: the lamp had to be lit, the pole had to have light hitting it, the ground underneath needed a pool of light, and the light of the lamp itself needed to be on (which also required little lens flares for each lamp).
The motorcycle’s light needed to look like it was on and it needed to be casting light on the ground.
I had to light up several windows in the buildings (which was pretty much a yellow solid with a glow).
I had to replace the sky.
And every single one of these layers needed to be motion-tracked to the camera’s movement. And, for layers that were completely digital (the lens flares, windows, the sky, etc.) I had to match the grain of the original footage.

And that was just one shot.

So, I have some experience and some tips:

Pay close attention to everything the two Daves said. They both have a lot of experience and they mean what they say.

For the love of God/Buddha/Allah/Hare Krishna/your monkey ancestors/the flying spaghetti monster, do your best to avoid shooting the sky. If you do shoot the sky, keep in mind that you’re likely going to have to replace it and when you do, all the edges of everything it touches may have a terrible little inner glow that makes it look fake again. A cloudy sky is still a very bright thing.

If there’s anything that would ordinarily be lit up at night, you’re going to have to light it in post. (Lamps, headlights, windows of a building.) Sometimes (as with the pool of light under a streetlight) you can just put a copy of your footage over the top of the comp and mask where the light should be hitting to add back the light. But don’t forget to light the lamppost itself. And the lightbulb. And anything that might be close to the lamp, such as a bush, tree, or building.

If your camera does move (and I suspect it must since you’re filming a fight scene) remember that anything you’re doing in post will have to match the moving of the camera. So, any sky replacement, pools of light, lens flares, etc. will have to be matched perfectly to the movement of the camera.

My biggest tip is to PLAN!
Storyboard your fight scene very carefully.
Shoot some test footage and practice working with it. Don’t shoot your whole thing (again) and hope it’ll all look alright.

– 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’ve got Shine, this tutorial from Trapcode will help you. (Or, if you want, you could use the CC plugin that comes with AE, [I forget it’s name and I’m not at my AE machine] instead)

– 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 did link a tutorial on some basic AE things and Dave gave you a step by step.
You import your photos…you place them where you want them…you animate the camera. That’s it.

Importing footage and positioning layers are some of the most basic things in After Effects. Right at the top of this thread is a link to tutorials. Some of them cover basic AE techniques. The manual would also be a great resource.

AE is a very complex program and requires a lot of experience to produce good work quickly. There’s a reason some of us get paid money to do it on a daily basis.

However, the project you linked to should be able to be done with a very small level of skill. Read the manual, check out some of the basic tutorials and you should be able to do it.

– 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.