[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

One thing I have to add- if you can try to pre-render – that always speeds up the workflow. I know it may not give you total control, and it’s a pain if you have to go back and change something, but that’s how most things where done a few years back and it works.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior Compositor/VFX Artist

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

Use puppet tool- I remember a tutorial that described how to make a wind tunnel using particles and puppet tool, try searching the cow for that and use the same technique.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior Compositor/VFX Artist

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

280×190 means a pixel aspect ratio of 1.473684210526316, so unless your original video has that aspect ratio, the final will look distorted. Use Adobe Media Encoder to compress and make sure the PAR is correct.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior Compositor/VFX Artist

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

I would say that the shadow edges are too clean – you need a bit of feathering there- and that there is no gradient in the shadow. Try to match the shadow of your animated object with the real shadows in the shot a bit more. Put a real bar in the same position and move it by hand to have a reference shot.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior Compositor/VFX Artist

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

get the latest update still available for CS3 from Adobe.
Enable Disk Cache
Turn off OpenGL and multiprocessing.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior Compositor/VFX Artist

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

How about a sandwich- duplicate your rings layer, put the chips in between (you’ll have to roto them), and draw a mask for the front half on the top rings layer, then just copy and invert the same for the bottom.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior Compositor/VFX Artist

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

Although there may be various ways of faking metallic reflection, nothing compares with one done in a 3D program. If you have Zaxwerks Invigorator you can import a 3d object and assign a texture/reflection map inside AE- best way to get what you’re after, in my opinion.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior Compositor/VFX Artist

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

Not really sure I get what you’re after, but if you want to create light streaks in AE not using Particular (the iPod style light streaks)you need some sort of movement for the light sources, thus footage and not a still. With movement you can use 32bit, glow and frame blending to play around. On a still….? maybe if you animate some dots, precomp and use the above mentioned.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior Compositor/VFX Artist

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

If it’s just a still you’re better off using Photoshop to do this.
Just build some streaks of color matching the color of the lights, blur them, add glow and play with compositing modes (add, screen…etc)

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior Compositor/VFX Artist

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

You could do what Dave suggested, and I agree- sometimes there’s nothing like the real thing, ar you can use some of the techniques in this tutorial to get what you’re after:

https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/3d_ball_dispersion/

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior Compositor/VFX Artist