[Michael Szalapski]

AE is very frustrating until you understand it. Then it’s an absolute delight. However, as you’ve discovered, sometimes it takes a long while of banging your head against the wall before you break through.
Keep at it.
And I agree with Todd. The effects many 3rd party plug-ins achieve can be created within After Effects with a little bit of knowledge and experience with the program.

You say you’ve been through After Effects Apprentice? Good. If you want to really get in depth with it, read through the manual too. Make sure you’re sitting with the computer so you can play with stuff while you’re reading.
Also, Total Training’s AE program is amazing. I cannot reccomend it highly enough.
Don’t forget the tutorials here at the COW, focus on ones that teach workflow and other “boring” things until you’re comfortable in the program, then move on to the swoopy fun ones.
And, of course VideoCopilot.net has a great basics section as well as some amazingly swoopy tutes.

As far as plug-in recommendations go, I would like to point out that the longer I use AE the less I use plug-ins. My way of doing it gets better results that fit my needs without me trying to bend some plug-in to my will.
That being said, there are some plug-ins that I wouldn’t think about going without.
Zaxwerks 3d Invigorator – I’ve used it since AE 5.5 for getting beautiful true 3d text in AE. Some of their other plug-ins like 3d Flag and the Reflector one also get some use in my projects.
Trapcode’s Particular – while you can use CC Particle World and other effects that ship with AE to achieve 3d particles, none of the options beat Particular for power and control. Having your comp lights have an effect on the particles is just fantastic (and came in handy on a recent project for the military.)
Knoll Light Factory Pro – while lens flares had a tendency a few years ago to be overused, there are still many occasions when it is tasteful to use them (or a client requests it…arg.) When that happens, it’s nice to be able to have a powerful tool to create good-looking lens flares. This helps your lens flare avoid looking cliché and with their recent release of an AE script that makes the lens flares work in 3d, it has only gotten more powerful. (The lens flares can be obscured by any and every 3d object when the light moves behind them in 3d space! AMAZING!)

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

Fields have absolutely nothing to do with how well you can pull a key. Color resolution is your enemy. If you’re using DV or (even worse) HDV cameras, they’re just tossing away tons of color information.

Someone else asked about a good camera for chromakeying work two days ago. They’ve recieved a few helpful answers.

This link has more information on color resolution.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

How have you created the tags? Are they a particle effect or layers animated individually?

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

You can’t open AE files created in newer versions of the software.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

What particle effect are you using? What is the layer structure like? What’s parented to what? Why is there a null object? What/how are you animatinf things?

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

What particle effect are you using? What is the layer structure like? What’s parented to what? Why is there a null object? What/how are you animatinf things?

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

There are several ways to do this. I will list a couple.

1. In your original composition create a black solid. Mask out a bar shape. Put it at the top. Duplicate it. Put the duplicate at the bottom. (you can also create a Title in Premiere and create black rectangles like this.)

2. Drop your 4:3 footage into a 16:9 comp as Todd suggested, but instead of matching it vertically, scale it so it fills it horizontally. You won’t have black bars showing, but you will have proper anamorphic 16:9 like Hollywood DVD’s. That way you will get black bars when you play it on an old 4:3 TV, but when you show it on a 16:9 TV it will fill the screen rather than having black on the sides AND top and bottom.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

Without seeing the camera’s motion, it’s hard to see what issues there are. I’m guessing that there’s no dolly track – that it’s handheld. Since you’re just now asking how to fix the shot, rather then thinking it out ahead of time, it indicates that there was no planning in place.
So I’m guessing the camera guy probably gets closer and further from the guy in addition to tilting and bouncing. This, coupled with the fact that you’re doing a 360 means you’re going to have a difficult job.
For future reference:
Since you’re going to be rotoscoping him out, you could have put the camera on a tripod, the guy on a turntable (or lazy susan-type thing) and spun the guy. (Maybe even in front of a chroma screen; might have saved you some rotoscoping trouble).

It may be easier to use some third party stabilization plug-in…

Again, without seeing the actual footage it’s hard to know how to deal with it. You might have to do it in pieces, a bit at a time and possibly some frame-by-frame tweaking yourself by hand.

Using AE’s built-in tracker, I would track a point on the ground by his feet to stabilize. I’d do it for as many frames as I could get away with, then appy it, choose a new spot and do it again.
Or, when that didn’t work, I would just go frame by frame through the footage in the tracker, making sure the tracker point is in the right spot on each frame. You may need to do some smoothing and tweaking after, but that might start you off on the right way.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

A quick Google search turns up what you need.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

You forgot to precompose it first.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.