Neat masking ideas, GG! I could see this working really well with a small handful of big puzzle pieces (like 4 or 6), and you have the advantage of keeping *exactly* the piece of video you want on each piece (like a face or eyes), for dramatic effect! A variation of this could be used for the "broken mirror" effect where each reflection is hand-picked.

For a cheap, fast puzzle explosion, if you don't need the 3D turning and moving, you could make a single puzzle mask with the pieces breaking and moving out and use it to mask the outgoing video. Combine this with some Track Motion zoom, or "Cross Effect Zoom A Only" transitioning to get some motion to more or less track the pieces (make sure the pieces move outward from the center). If applied over a short enough period of time, you might no notice the video "slipping" across the face of individual pieces, but the overall effect of pieces moving and video zooming will convey the effect of the video breaking apart and moving away. Coming up with the mask is the hard part, but once you have one, you can re-use it easily. If you can't find an animated mask, you could also zoom a static mask to get motion. Match the mask zooming with the video zooming. You might be able to create a mask from one of the SpiceMaster transitions (I'd suggest one, but they are not in front of me).

///d@