[Michael Szalapski]

If you have an AE layer in position that you’re happy with (as in your first example) Zaxwerks will work for you. You can use an AE layer to place Zaxwerks items. I’m not by my AE machine at the moment, but it’s a feature in Zaxwerks.

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

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[Michael Szalapski]

There are a few tutorials here on the COW that may point you in the right direction.
This one is a quick readable tutorial (remember those?) that talks about displacing text and also talks about time displacement; which is fun.
To go more in-depth there is a three-part video series here, here, and here about displacement in AE.

Now, you could possibly achieve this effect with some work on bezier warp under Effect>Distort…actually, you should probably play around with all the other options in that section; it’s possible you’ll be able to recreate it, but it’s also possible you’ll stumble on your own unique effect that fits your project 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]

How you go about creating a video loop matters entirely on what the content of the video is.

– 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]

This is very simple to do, but very time consuming. There is no quick, button click that will get you this effect. It’s a lot of masks in AE with some wiggling.
Check out this thread.

– 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]

Both could be done in After Effects.
Both videos involve two main elements:
1) to get the cartoons: a lot of basic animation techniques which could be used on solid layers (or shape layers) with masks in After Effects
2) to get him isolated from the background: rotoscoping

– 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 seem to remember there being a sample project kicking around on these forums somewhere for an effect just like you describe with stars and everything…I’ll have to see if I can find it. But, let’s assume I can’t and you go right ahead and start with these suggestions:

If you do what Erik suggested and precompose your star layers you can then add the echo effect to your precomp and you’ll have those trails behind the stars.
Aharon Rabinowitz has a tutorial that covers how to do that.
There are several tutorials for creating 3d stuff in AE. Search for 3d text; some of them may work for you.
There are also a couple of plugins out there including Zaxwerks’ Serpentine.

– 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 have been many posts ever since the beginning of this website on video cards for use with AE.

The advice boils down to this: Get lots of processing power and lots of RAM. Video card has no effect in terms of rendering time.

In this thread Adobe’s own Adolfo Rozenfeld says

OpenGL rendering is not meant to be a means for producing high-quality end results in rendered files from AE. So graphics cards, no matter how powerful, will not affect Render Queue renders at all. The exception is enabling the OpenGL renderer, but this will give you different results (more draft-like) than the software renderer.

Nvidia has a model tailored for the CS4 applications (Quadro CX).
This and other high-end models should give you a very nice experience in terms of having smooth interactions when adjusting parameters and dragging layers around, but they will not improve rendering speeds. This card will also provide advantages when using OpenGL accelerated features in Photoshop CS4 (3D, zooming/panning, etc), and I understand it also provides acceleration for some features in Premiere Pro. Overall, you can expect the drivers for this card to work nicely with CS4 apps, which is of course a good thing. So, it could be a good investment – just don’t expect it to speed up AE renders.

Finally, bear in mind that with a configuration like you have now, you probably are getting render times 10-20x faster than you would have had a couple of years ago. This is nothing short of amazing, and it’s not only a consequence of modern hardware, but also of the multi-processing feature in AE.

– 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]

Welcome, Scott! We look forward to learning from you and your expertise/experience.

– 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 assume you don’t mean Effect>Stylize>Glow.
And, from your description I don’t think you mean Starglow.
Either one can be used in a very soft and subtle manner though.

– 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’d have to tweak the speed of the fish moving toward the middle; they’ll have to get slower as they go.
What you could do, instead of tweaking, then redoing all the duplication, is to put the fish with all its attributes into a precomp then duplicate and offset the precomp. That way any change you make will already be reflected in the duplications.

Or, how about make the fish a 3d layer and instead of messing with scale, just push it further away.

Those are just two ideas; I’m sure somebody who’s better than I at expressions will be able to think up something more efficient.

– 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.