[Rjf E:613]

Agreed, videocopilot.net is the place to start. Heck, spend $50 on either Riot Gear or Film Magic Pro (both worth it IMO… Riot Gear in particular has been extremely useful to me) and you’ll get 8 300-type presets for free, via this promotion:

Epic Styles Promotion

rjf

[Rjf E:613]

On the “examples” front, Andrew Kramer has two tutorials that utilize motion tracking (for two different purposes actually). The focus isn’t motion tracking related, but are excellent nonetheless. Both can be found among his tutorials here:

videocopilot.net

#1 (Sky replacement) and #13 (suicide

[Rjf E:613]

on the first effect:
Best results will be a 3D program. You’re right, it’s not CC Page Turn. You can do a simple turn (not a curl) by using Card Wipe, but then that’s not the look you’re going after. You may also be able to get a similar look with Zaxwerks’ new 3D Warps plug-in:
Zaxwerks 3D Warps

I don’t have this plug-in so I can’t help you there. 🙁

On the 2nd effect:
How familiar are you with After Effects? The distortion is handled by the displacement Map Effect. Click Aharon Rabinowitz’s picture above and scroll way down to find his 3-part tutorials on Displacement mapping. You can also go to Ayato@web for inspiration but the examples he uses (while the best on the web) can be hard to decipher:
Ayato@web

In particular look at effect #’s 21 and 26.

rjf

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1.) CONTINUED… it occured to me after I posted that an adjustment layer isn’t necessary. Still duplicate your fractal noise layer as before, but this time, ONLY apply colorama to the bottom of the two noise layers. Turn this layer’s Track Matte to Luma (or inv. Luma) as before. The top layer will still shut off, and that’s ok. Turn on the checkerboard background and you’ll see that the black areas are indeed transparent.

The advantage here is that there’s no adjustment layer affecting all of the other layers below it so a precompose may not be necessary (unless you like keeping things tidy).

rjf

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1.) You want the colorama effect to NOT apply to the black sections, FULLY apply to the white sections and PARTIALLY apply to the grey sections? Try duplicating the fractal noise layer and putting an adjustment layer between these two noise layers. Apply colorama to the adj. layer and change its Track Matte mode to Luma (or Inv. Luma depending on the look you’re going for). The top fractal noise layer will shut off automatically and you’ll have it effected only on the whitest pixels. (you may need to precompose these three layers).

2.) You can animate the fractal noise layer itself right to left by adjusting the Offset Turbulence layer on the X axis. This parameter is found under the “Transform” sub-folder of the Fractal Noise effect. I do this all the time when wanting to create a rippling flag.

Hope it helps!

rjf

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What are you having troubles with? In the last step, you’re using your text or logo (created in step 1) and applying two effects to it. The first is Compound Blur, using Step 3 as the blur layer (or the blur mapping if that helps). the second effect is the Displacement Map using step 4 as the displacement map layer. Note the non-animating 50% gray layer added to step 4. This will cause the displacement to come to a stop when the gray layer is revealed.

Because steps 3 and steps 4 are animated rigth to left already (as they are precompositions of step 2, where you’ve created the animation), keyframes in the last step should be unnecessary.

When you’ve got the displacement and the blur looking correct, you apply the glow effect lastly. You should be done.. Does that help?

[Rjf E:613]

I seem to recall an animation preset that had a random fade in using horizontal lines. Sorry I don’t remember the name as I’m at work right now but you might try the ones built into AE 7 and see if any are close. Of course they are fully tweakable once you find one that’s close to what you’re looking for.

Hope this helps!

rjf

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I’ve found this video to be most useful (and low cost to boot):

here

Hope it helps!

rjf

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I might be wrong but doesn’t Zaxwerks’ original plug-in Invigorator (standard & pro) have primitives

[Rjf E:613]

I’ll guide you to two:

After Effects 101

and

After Effects intro movies

For the 2nd link, a subscription is required for all of the movies, but several of the initial tutorials are free. I might suggest you pony up $25 for one month and watch them all if you don’t know anything about After Effects yet.

These tutorials detail about 1% of what After Effects is about but I hope it helps you get started.