[Michael Szalapski]

Richard is right, what you’re asking about is simply the basics of the program. Read through the manual, try some of the basic introductory tutorials here on the cow and at VideoCopilot.net and you will learn how to do all of that and much more.

There is a tutorial somewhat like that here on the COW as well.

– 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]

For AE work you might consider one of the new iMacs. Some of them have very nice processors that rival the ones in the Mac Pro desktops and they do include a monitor. If 20 seconds extra matters to you then get as good of a processor as you can afford and make sure to have at least 2 Gigs of RAM for every core in the processor.

– 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’d probably be better to post this in one of the jobs sections.
Jobs (low) or jobs (high) depending on how much you’re willing to pay for the work (i.e. what level of quality you want).

– 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’re right John, it looks like his lightsaber solid is not the same size as his comp.

Adrian, you could also try to change the size of the solid itself. Select the solid and hit ctrl+shift+Y (or Layer>Solid Settings) and click the Make Comp Size button. That will make the solid actually the size of the comp, but (as with the other option) will make the mask size be bigger.

– 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]

Try using a color key (or some other type of keying effect) on a duplicate layer to key out the orange then reverse the alpha (Channel>Invert then change the Channel it’s inverting to Alpha), so all you have is the orange on screen and apply glowy effects on that layer to your heart’s content.

– 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]

Try the Trapcode 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]

Just to double-check; you are doing your RAM preview by pressing 0 on your number pad, right?

– 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 long as your playhead is on the keyframe of the layer whose value you’re changing, any keyframes you also have selected will change regardless of whether the playhead is on them without adding keyframes.

– 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 couple of tutorials that might help you.
Part one
Part two
Basically, you have to precompose your snow layer and mask the precomp. In most cases, effects need to be precomposed before they can be masked out. The linked tutorials should explain the reasons why and should teach you a lot about one of the most basic things you’ll need to know when you’re working in AE: precomposing.

As a side note; I noticed that nobody responded to this post yet and that your only other post on here (back in November) was not responded to either. I am aware that the COW is used by people all over the world, and English may not be your first language, so I’m going to try to help you so that you may be taken more seriously.

The word, “please” is spelled with vowels such as e and a (as in my example) and is not just a p and an l followed by a bunch of s’s. It may be acceptable in certain areas online, but not in a professional forum like this one. Typing words like that appears to most English-speakers as the blathering of an immature child.

Effects is spelled with an e in this case (it’s a completely different word from affects even though they are pronounced the same.) A good hint for the future is to look at what you’re talking about (the “Effect” menu, the name of the program “After Effects” etc.) for hints on how to spell things.

Speaking of things that are pronounced the same, the word “you” should have all three letters in it. Even though it may seem clever that the letter u is pronounced the same way, it just looks immature to neglect to type the whole word. Again, this is something that many Americans and British do in many online areas such as MySpace and YouTube comments, but is not appropriate in professional communication.

A question only requires a single question mark following the question rather than a bunch of exclamation marks and question marks mixed together. All that punctuation makes you seem like an overly-emotional 12-year-old who wants to get attention, not like a serious individual seeking professional assistance with a project.

I hope this little side note helps you as you learn the Enlgish language and try to become more of a professional in the world of compositing with After Effects.

– 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’s a tutorial here on the COW about animating a butterfly that might help 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.