Trying to duplicate this "Energy Flow" effect (originally created in AE)

Question

Following the tutorial from videocopilot on "soul removal"...
http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/soul_removal/
I created a couple variations on an energy glow effect in AE, here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzdwK2LoQbE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWYrfsSMZ0k
I think this should be easy to duplicate in Motion, but I'm going slightly nuts trying to figure it out. The effect is created by having some simple white circle particles with AE's Fast Blur and CC Vector Blur added. I know how to do something similar to Fast Blur in Motion, but I can't figure out how to achieve something equivalent to CC Vector Blur. There must be some way of creating something similar, though. Any Motion gurus out there care to help me save my sanity?
(I know there are somethings that AE can do, that Motion can't, but I don't think this is one. I would hope that Motion is able to do this)

Answer 1

First of all, thanks for intriguing me enough that I decided to waste my morning figuring this out.
Anyway, I watched the tutorial, and the conclusion I came to is that to attempt to duplicate the tutorial step by step is to undermine motion's capabilities.
Now, I will preface this by saying that my "energy flow" is not identical. But I think it looks really good. Also, I didn't work to modify it all that much, so I'm convinced that with a little tweaking, it'll look even better than the AE version.
Ok. When watching the AE tutorial, Andrew Kramer uses the CC Vector blur to turn circle particles into more of a smoky, curvy line. When looking at the way vector blur affected the particles, it reminded me of the caustics generator in Motion. So here's what I did.
First, I borrowed a pre-existing particle emitter that already looks like energy. You can find it in the library under the abstract folder in Particles. It's called Flow 01 interestingly enough. Then I adjusted the emission angle to 90 and the range to a small number like 7 or so. This gets the particles (which BTW are curved lines, not circles) moving to the right like the tutorial.
Then I increased the speed quite a bit, and the birth rate a little, and introduced some speed randomness. Again, you can tweak these to give this the look you want. Once I got the flow moving, I had to set up the distortion.
I created a new group and placed the caustics generator in there. I tweaked the generator so that the water-like ripples were small, bright, and had a high level of refraction. Then I applied a gaussian blur to the generator to soften the edges quite a bit.
Going back to my particle group, I added the Refraction filter from the Distortion folder. But (and this is important), I added it to the GROUP, not to the emitter. The reason has to do with a step below. I used the caustics generator as the source for the refraction (and turned off the caustics group as well) and made sure I had high levels of refraction and softness.
This more or less made my emitter look like a reflection in water, until I fixed the resolution for the group. Then I got the look I was going for.
And that is all there is to it. You'll still have to do the rest like duplicate the emitter, add an emitter that does the little flying particles, but the energy stream looks good to me.
I'm including a link to my project so you can take it apart. I hope this helps.
[Energy Flow|http://www.timesavertutorials.com/fileshare/energy.zip]
Andy