[Michael Szalapski]

Put your mask on a separate layer and use that layer as a track matte.
Or put your particles in a different composition and mask the precomp.

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[Michael Szalapski]

I’m not quite sure what you’re asking for, but it sounds like you could just put a lens flare on there. You might want to colorize the flare layer to make it match the cutting light. Then for the brightness of the flare put a wiggle expression so that it flickers.

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[Michael Szalapski]

Vectors will be vectors when you choose the “collapse transformations” button on the vector’s layer. It’s right next to the motion blur, shy, and other buttons. It looks like a squashed bug. Look at Adobe’s help files on importing and using vectors; Adobe’s help is actually quite helpful.

As far as importing bitmaps go, so long as you have a good quality source, it will be good quality in After Effects. However, the size at which it should be created depends entirely on the size of your final composition and how scaled up (or how close in 3d space) you plan to make your bitmap layers. If you’re making a video in standard definition in the United States, then your composition won’t be larger than 720 pixels x 480 pixels. Unless you’re planning to really zoom in to your bitmap layer, it won’t need to be larger than that.

Did that help?

– 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]

Would it be possible to get a bit more information from you on the nature of your problem?
How many layers are in your composition besides the one with which you’re having the problem? What effects are applied to the layer? What sort of camera do you have in the scene?
A screenshot would be nice, or even even a link to the After Effects file itself.

– 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]

According to YouTube’s help page on uploading higher quality videos they do, in fact, accept .mov files. Rendering your video out as mpeg4 would be a good option. You may also choose to do .wmv, that also works.

And, like Dave said, it should be 1280, not 1208.

YouTube’s help pages are where I got all of this info and, I’m guessing here, probably have the answers to many other questions you may have.

– 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 first one would be the easier of the two in my opinion. Just use the generate>beam effect. Several layers with the beam effect applied with a bit of stylize>glow on the layers themselves and the appropriate amount of glow added over top for some light spill over the actress should get you close to the desired effect.

– 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 several threads related to this. Please use the search function in the forums. A Google search for upscale footage ae turns up a few plugins 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]

It’s hard to really tell all of the fine details in this compressed version, but so far I think it is looking very good. If the director didn’t appreciate you before, I hope he does now. From what I could see you may afford to have some more light spill around the plane from the moon.
Perhaps you could duplicate your comp (but without any of the trees or original footage – you just want the moon and the plane – apply the stylize>glow effect on an adjustment layer. Then bring that comp in to your main comp and mask it so it just shows up where the moon is, then use a second layer of the plane as a track matte for the comp so that the glow only shows up where the plane is and doesn’t blow out the whole moon.
Again, I can’t really see it in the detail I would like in order to make suggestions, but so far it’s looking much 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]

Does it all have to be in the same shot? In every Hollywood explosion these days it’s shot from several angles. Surely you could have a couple angles of the explosion itself (using shatter composited with all the stuff David mentioned) finally settling on a smoking shot of the aftermath. The final shot wouldn’t require shatter at all, just the placement of layers in Photoshop or, if you must, After Effects.

– 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]

When you ask how to do this, I assume you are asking for a more automated way to do it rather than doing it by hand.
One, still somewhat time consuming way, would be to make a composition of footage for every row you plan to have. Then make as many duplicates of that comp in another comp as you want boxes. Then offset each one in time by a few frames. If you just need the first part where all of the boxes are the same just cutting after each other, then you only need one precomp offset in time through the whole comp window.
(Doing this with the 3d layer switches turned on and having them set at different z distances and scaled up or down to look the same size might be a fun twist.)

– 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.