[Michael Szalapski]

Sounds like you’ve got a lot on your plate!

I’m a bit absent-minded as well, that’s why I keep written accounts of what I need to do; otherwise I’d forget.

Find a program like Outlook on the PC or iCal on the Mac. (Or maybe something a little more complex) And use it to keep yourself organized. Make tasks, to do lists, schedule activities, etc. That way you know what you need to do and what you’ve done.

– 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 not by my AE or Photoshop machines at the moment. However, a real quick though. You can export your stuff from AE to be used in Photoshop and apply the effect that way, if need be.

– 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]

Another thought:
If you use the Foam effect its particles can be made to attract and stick to each other. Also you can use a gradient to direct the flow of the particles. Then you could use CC Wide Time or one of the other time effects to give it that line look.

– 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 not in front of my AE machine at the moment, but I seem to remember it being possible to drive things in card wipe and card dance by an image map (i.e. a precomp) If you made a precomp that had a black and white radial gradient, you should be able to drive the flip that way.

– 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]

Card Wipe.

– 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 they did it? Planning, preparation, discussion and lots of work.
There are a lot of things going on. It is a professional news open. In all likelihood, a team of people worked on this. To walk you through how to create this whole thing would take a really, really long time.

Is there a specific effect or two in which you’re interested? This looks like a lot of rather basic techniques done well, so it shouldn’t be too hard for us to help.

There have been other threads on BBC news opens such as this 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]

In AE you can use Auto Trace to make masks out of shapes drawn in Illustrator, which could be edited. However, if you want to grow arrows there are a few other techniques out there. The question of how to grow arrows was actually asked the same day you asked your question. Here’s that thread. There are some links in that thread that should 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.

[Michael Szalapski]

I know of very few people who use the Cinepak codec. It usually has that problem you mentioned.
If it’s a Windows-based machine, you can always to an AVI with Microsoft DV. It makes it smaller and it’s not too bad quality-wise. You can even do some WMV (Windows Media Video) that look good and those file sizes are tiny in comparison.
If you’re using a Mac, there are several quicktime options with which you can play. The animation codec is large, but you can lower the quality somewhat which shrinks the file size. I’m not in front of my AE machine at the moment, but I belive there are several other Quicktime options, such as Sorensen 3, that might work 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]

Well that’s unfortunate. I guess you’ll have to take it into Premiere or Final Cut and convert it to something else.

– 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 Roland mentioned there are plugins out there to do just that. Here is a partial list.

And I believe the tool to remove grain in AE is called remove grain. But I’m not sure. It takes a sample and removes the grain. It’s very powerful (which is code for BEWARE IT HAS LOTS OF SETTINGS).

– 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.