[Michael Szalapski]

You need to make sure, under your render settings, that audio output is on. By default it is off.

– 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]

Paul is right that it would be better to have a second instance of your traffic over the top of your tv screen layer. It’s not too late to do it his way either.
Duplicate your traffic layer and move it on top of your comp.
Select the mask that’s on the tv screen. Copy it. (I’m not in front of my AE machine at the moment, but I think you can just use cmd+c on the mac, ctrl+c on the pc)
Paste it on your top traffic layer.
If all your keyframes and everything line up properly, then delete the mask from the screen layer and all should be 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]

A lot of this could be done in AE, but it wouldn’t quite look the same. The mountains could be done by cartoonizing stock footage of mountain flyovers or, for some of the shots, just some clever 2.5 work in AE.
The thing that roars then swipes the screen black could be done in AE as well; it just wouldn’t be quite as realistic. As I went through the video frame by frame you could see that it was almost definitely done in a 3d program although you could potentially get a similar look from stylizing footage or animating something in AE. You could have a layer for its head and a layer for its mouth and then animate the mouth part coming down from under the head piece. Again, it wouldn’t look quite the same, but I’ll bet it’s possible to get something that looks similar.
The running thing at the very end of the sequence would be relatively easy to do in AE since it’s just a black form. It could be animated the traditional way as some solids in AE. You could either do it from scratch or rotoscope over actual footage.

– 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’ve used 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]

WMV does HD very nicely. (Quicktime should work. Something must be weird on your system or something.)

– 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]

Lots of preparation is involved in something like this, some of this looks like it may have been done in a 3d program, but it looks like most of it could be done in AE.
There are several effects going on here. About what specific effect are you wondering?

– 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]

Have a magnified version of the footage and use some particle creating plug-in and make the particles be bars. Use the bars as a track matte for the magnified footage. You could make the bars white on a black background (maybe varying opacities?) and use the luma for a track matte, or just a regular track matte.

Just an idea.

– 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 gradient overlaid on top of the screen to make it have lighting to match the scene would help. As would a layer with noise laid over top of the screen to match the grain/noise of your original footage.

– 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 think to get what you’re looking for a true 3d app is going to be your only way to get it. There are a couple of ways you could fake it in AE, but none of them are going to look that good. Although, now that I think about it, in a true 3d app the globe’s texture wouldn’t necessarily work that well either. Nah, I still think it’ll be better.

You could try pushing in to the globe then fade into a regular layer that’s got a distorted bulge-type effect.

Oooh, oooh, or try bezier warp to make a globe and then unfurl it…might work.

– 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]

Dave’s right. Lots of planning is your key. And he’s also right about vectors. You can make them as tiny as you want; they’re vectors you can scale them up until they’re as big as God Himself and they’ll still be crisp and clean.

I found a tutorial that you might find useful as well. It was posted about four years ago when the growing things were really popular: https://library.creativecow.net/articles/hansen_jaysen/growing.php

– 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.