Hi there BMS, hope your well.

I think that considering your fairly new to this, those clips are looking really really good. You should def start rendering in layers to get a better look. You could try doing a beauty, diffuse, specular and shadow pass to get you going. There is some info on doing this in the Maya help files. I've used Premiere a few times, but I'm not sure how great it is for good compositing??

Anyway, keep up the good work, its coming along fab!

LisaG