[Michael Szalapski]

Does Todd Kopriva’s blog post help at all?

– 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]

Knoll Light Factory Pro, currently offered by Red Giant is an excellent lens flare creation tool. You can create your own, customize theirs, or simpy use one of their decently large library of lens flares. It makes use of your GPU to speed render and response times. Also it gives you several options for keying.
It is currently the most popular lens flare plug-in on the planet.

However, VideoCopilot.net is preparing what could be a better 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]

Do you want photo-realism or stylized?

– 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]

Click on the footage in your timeline and press the S key on your keyboard, this will reveal the scale property.
Click and drag to the left and the number will go down. Or just click on it and type in a new number.
Make it as small as you want it.
Alternatively you can click on your footage in the composition window and drag from the corners (hold shift down to keep it proportional)

Then, with your footage still selected, press P on your keyboard to reveal the position property and click and drag (or click and type in new numbers) to move it.
Alternatively you can just drag it around in the composition window.

– 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’s a fairly simple process to explain, but it takes a long time and a lot of work to accomplish it. Especially at the level Disney achieved. That end sequence was spectacular.
Do a search here at the COW for “The Kid Stays In the Picture”. It was a film that used a lot of pictures that were clearly flat moving in 3d.
It’s a similar effect.
You basically freeze your frame, export it to Photoshop, extract the images you want to have separated, then recreate the background behind them so they can move without leaving a hole.
It’d be easiest if after you shot your scene, you removed the actors and shot a blank plate. Then, if you want to have other things move, remove them and shoot another blank plate. That way you have background info you can paste in rather than trying to clone it.
In AE then you just move the different layers in 3d space.

I hope this helps

– 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]

Hooray for keyframing by hand!
Or you could try a duplicate of the layer and some kind of color key.

– 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 glad you got it figured out. I was going to say there’s a tutorial here on the COW about it, but you’ve already got it solved!

– 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 track matte can be done with alpha or with luminance. Are you familiar with layer masks in Photoshop? It’s a similar principle.
If you go to Digital Juice’s training page for their Compositor’s Toolkit and scroll down about three-quarters of the way, you’ll see some tutorials called Custom Ink. It’s a series on revealing things with track mattes using organic footage.

You could do it yourself without buying stock footage by combining an animated fractal noise effect with ramps and other color corrections over time…but that’s not overly important right now.

Let’s just try it out for ourselves.
Start a new project. Make a new comp. A normal dv sized comp will be fine for this test. Call this comp, “Main”. In this comp create a red solid the same size as your comp. Rename the layer, “Red”. Now create a blue solid the same size as the comp and name it, “Blue”. (Ctrl+Y on the PC or CMD+Y on the Mac is a shortcut key to create a new solid).

Your layer list should now be:
Blue
Red

Thrilling, right?
Now, create another comp the same size as your existing comp. Call this new comp, “Track Matte Comp” or some other creative title. Create a new solid in this new comp the same size as the comp. (it doesn’t matter the color) Apply Effect>Generate>Ramp. You should have a nice black to white gradient.
Back in your Main comp put the Track Matte comp at the top of your layer list which should now look like:
Track Matte Comp
Blue
Red

Cool?

Now, in your timeline window you should have a panel that offers the option to change the layer’s blending modes. (If it’s not there, there will be a panel with lots of switches for the layers. Underneath that there should be a wide button to click on that will switch that panel to what we want)
On the blue layer, under Trk Matt (or whatever it’s called) click that drop down and choose the luma matte option.

WOAH!

Now you’ve got a red and blue gradient. If you go back into your Track Matte Comp and create a new white solid – say, about 200×200 – and a black one the same size and you offset their positions, you’ll be able to see what’s going on when you switch back to your Main comp. What’s white on the track matte layer will be there and the darker the track matte layer gets, the more transparent the layer will be. If you turn off the eyeball for the red layer and click the little button on the bottom of your comp window that switches between the checkerboard and black for the background, you can see the opacity change that way too.

I hope that made sense.

If not, I’ve attached an example project here on the COW (219_trackmattefun.aep.zip just click the disc to download it) that fits what I just went over.
(I also included a “more complicated” part that answers your original question about how to use it on buildings.)

I hope this helps!

– 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 mean torches as in electric lights that Americans call flashlights following Simon’s suggestion you could use Trapcode’s Lux plug-in in place of T-Beam if you’ve got it…
However – also agreeing with Simon here – without the proper play of light across the actors’ faces, it’s going to look very unrealistic.

– 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]

What’s supposed to be causing the change in color though? Is it the pure spirit of sport emanating from the runner? Or is he being chased by some dark evil?

Anyway, if you’re after what I think you’re after, I would use a layer with some nice organic movement as a track matte for your color changed layer. Maybe some footage of ink in water (from Digital Juice’s Compositor’s Toolkit perhaps).

– 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.