[Michael Szalapski]

Create a solid the same size as your comp. Put a mask on it. Use that layer (and as many duplicates as needed) as a track matte.

You could also create a layer in Photoshop and use it as a track matte. You can even do this in your editing app rather than doing it in After Effects, that way it can be part of your edit.

– 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]

Depending on how realistic you need it to be you could use multiple copies of the layer with Mr. Mercury on some and other distort effects on others.

But making it in wax and melting it would be even better.

– 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]

Any time you digitally slow something down by that much, it’s going to look juddery without some work. There are some plugins you can buy for AE that will do a better job of smoothly slowing it down.
I’ll try a couple of tips for you though.
I don’t know about that camera you’re using, but if the footage is interlaced you want the time slowdown to be in increments of two; so a 4 second clip should be slowed to 16 seconds. To get the time remapping plug in to do this, have your footage at the beginning of a comp that is 16 seconds long or longer. Apply time remapping. Drag the second (last) keyframe to the 16 second mark. Make sure your layer’s end point is there as well.
But if you’re simply slowing down the footage like this, you don’t need time remapping. Time remapping is used for more complicated things. You could just do Layer>Time>Time Stretch. Then just make your time factor 400%.
In either case, whether you use time remapping or time stretch you will need to turn on frame blending for your comp and for your footage layer. There are a couple of different frame blending options. The Adobe help files should assist you on how frame blending works.

– 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 mean you want the effect to be visible only inside the shape of the text? If so put your effect on its own layer and use your text layer as a track matte.

The AE manual is a great thing to read through. You will not only learn all the basics, such as how to use track mattes, but it will also give you tons more ideas on cool things to do.

– 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]

WIthout even using a search engine I bet you can find one.

I’ll bet if you click on where it says tutorials at the top of this forum’s page you can find one.

I’ll bet it even has a title like “How To Use Light Spill for Better Composites Without Plug-ins”.

– 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, you could set them up in 3d space and move the camera (NOT) zooming in. The benefit of this is that you can have other things in the shot too so it’s not just those rings or whatever.

As far as a step by step goes, I’m sure there are some online. Just try a search for creating a tunnel with particles or something like that.

– 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]

Is there a reason you’re not doing this with a particle program? You can just set it to shoot particles out that get larger and larger and don’t travel. Then you move the source around and it’s like you’re flying through a tunnel.

As for what you’re talking about, are you scaling them up or zooming in to them with a camera? It sounds like you should just be moving the camera, not zooming…

– 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]

Sometimes text and other things can look a bit jaggy depending on what kind of preview you’ve got going on; especially with aspect ratio correction on. Try a quick little render and see how it looks.

If that doesn’t work, please get a pic of what it looks like so we can see 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.

[Michael Szalapski]

The help files would be of great benefit to you here.
There is a button to press on your layers to “continually rasterize” which means it’ll read the vector data. I’m not in front of my AE machine right now, but I’d be able to show you in a second where it was if I were there. It looks like a squashed bug or a black sun, depending on who’s describing 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.

[Michael Szalapski]

Bryan, there is a special forum for beginners in AE here on the COW. It’s the After Effects Basics forum. The people who answer questions there are just as good as those here (in fact a lot of them are the same people), they’re just a lot more tolerant of Newbie-type questions over there. So if you have what you think may be a basic question, you can post it there without having to apologize for being green.

Although, come to think of it, aren’t we all supposed to be “going green”?

– 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.