Of course it can be done in After effects. It's not a simple piece of software. It's used extremely heavily in VFX and feature films.
If you want to animate zooming, key the focal length of the camera.
I know how to zoom, wasn't sure it can be keyed just like transparency and other things.
If so, I can make it look as if the robotic camera's zooming to analyze stuff such as moons (which are very detailed and exist around every planet that has them in reality, you can spot even those 4 small moons of Jupiter in that vid going on the ring).
At some point I considered exaggerating by adding even more stars in the background, but I think one star cluster's already enough. The scene's too huge as it is.
Hmm, I finally figured out how to eliminate the ring shadow from Jupiter (shadow attenuation from Raytracing). It was annoying me. Time to remake the scene and this will be final aspect of it.
Last edited by SilverFeather; 07-12-2011 at 11:27 PM.