About 3-6 hours a day for a week. It may seem like a lot, but anyone in conventional film editing will tell you this is fairly typical. You can get away with less, but I had specific, relatively complex ideas in mind.
Each movement has to be programmed, and all sorts of parameters must be established. Frame, color, position, rotation, cloning, saturation, size, brightness, and a few others I can't remember. Not only must start and stop values be set, but the rate of change in those values must be set ie logarithmic, exponential, linear, sine, random, etc. It's challenging, yet fun!
Here's a simplification of the process. Let's say I want to have a green beam appear in the upper left, and fade while moving to the upper right. I open a file that has a simple white dot in it. I place it on the timeline and drag it to the duration I want it to appear. On the position track below it, I select start position -25000,25000 end position 25000,2500, then set the move to "accelerate" lets say. On the color track below that, I select both start and end to 0,255,0. Then on the brightness track below that, I select start value of 255, end value of 120 and leave the default "linear" mode in place. Again, this is for a simple beam moving and fading, and will only take up 1-2 seconds of your song. You can see how more complex animations may take more time
It's a pretty intuitive GUI though, so It's not difficult to learn.
