darkhelmet said:

What Adywan did took him a LONG time to do, and he had the benefit of doing some of the effects with 3-D computer modeling if I'm not mistaken.

Actually the only shot that had any CG ships was the TIE fighter approach in the Death Star battle. The rest was done by using cut out photographs of the models and adding the motion blur effect that's built into After Effects. There is hell of a lot involved with doing anything like this. if you are adding extra ships to existing footage of a battle, for example, you need to mask all foreground elements , most of the time using keyframes to mask moving objects on each frame. Then you have to map out the movement for each extra element, making sure you test the movement each time you add an element to see if there are any conflicts with existing footage. Then there's your lasers. best way to do this is to grab a frame from one of the films that has a good straight laser. then just cut out the laser and you can use that for every laser for that particular colour. TIE lasers work better when you have cut out a laser sequence from the movie. mask each laser against a black background ans create a short avi file containing only the lasers. when you come to compositing lasers then add them to your project, adjust the positioning, size and rotation and use the "screen" blending mode.

The way i learned was just by playing around with the program and trying all effects settings to see what they can do.

Lightsabers you need to rotoscope every frame. It gets bloody tedious after a while, trust me.