[Michael Szalapski]

The fewer pictures you have per second, the higher quality each of the pictures is for the same amount of bandwidth. There is a threshold of how low quality you will accept vs. how fast you need the video to load. So, yes; it makes a difference on file size.
The question is, who is your audience? With the prevalence of broadband Flash video loads pretty quickly for many people. Are most of the visitors to your site going to have a fast connection?
Another question is how are you delivering the video? Who is hosting it? There may be bandwidth requirements there too…

I haven’t had to do much flash video, but what I’ve found is, if you have access to the Adobe Media Encoder, then render a high quality AVI or Quicktime out of AE and use the Encoder to do your Flash encoding and your life will be grand*.

*not a guarantee

– 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]

Yeah, I honestly can’t think of any way, other than hiring a special-effects post house, to make this look good. I tried to come up with a practical way to do it too, but the only thing I could come up with is some sort of electronically controlled static electricity holding hair on letters and then being turned off…
Lord knows it’s not going to look terribly photorealistic in AE. But perhaps photorealism is not the goal; perhaps only the concept needs to be conveyed. With some dedicated work and quite a bit of time, I’m sure that could be accomplished.

– 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]

Interesting.
Is the shedding caused by anything? i.e. do the letters shake, is there a shaving device, etc.?

My initial thought is that you could create the hairy letters, then create falling hair (separate effects) and composite the two together. You’d have the hair falling off animation as the hair becomes less and less on the letters. They don’t have to be attached. Hair is fine enough and there should be enough of it, that it’s not noticeable that the hair that is actually attached to the letters isn’t the hair that’s falling off.
That idea would work especially well if the letters shook the hair off or if there was a razor or something that could cover up part of it.

Alternatively, if all the hair is supposed to simply fall off all at once, you can get all your hair in place using Particular with no gravity, then keyframe gravity on.

Or you could use the time option to freeze time until the moment you want the hair to drop.

In any case, you’d want to use the floor physics model, set to bounce, but turn down the bounce.

I’m not in front of my AE machine at the moment so I can’t whip up some examples, but those are just some thoughts off the top of my head. If you want it to look realistic it may take a while. (Although, to be fair, hairy letters don’t exactly occur that often in nature.)

Let us know how it goes and if you find any other ways to do it; there are probably dozens.

– 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]

Why, of course! That’ll only be…
Sorry; doing a few calculations here…

100 Pounds of Gold, but totally worth it, no?
Also, you get 1 free ninja assassination of an annoying fellow student who learned After Effects and is doing better than you in class.

– 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]

Turning on caps-lock stops the composition window from updating; might be what you’re after.

– 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]

I agree with David. After Effects is not editing software, it is for motion graphics, effects, and compositing. While you could edit in it; it’s definitely not recommended.

– 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]

Awwww, c’mon Dave! I was about to create and then offer some VERY expensive plugins! I was even going to include the very special feature of just having to push the T on the keyboard to get to the opaciTy option.

– 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]

Also, make sure you have at least one, trained fire safety professional on hand, for insurance purposes.
But rather than constructing it yourself, perhaps you should look into hiring a professional pyrotechnician; they can assure you the right look.

Alternatively, you could use stock footage such as this clip from Artbeats. Or, if you want more control, a multitude of clips and (using a layer blending mode such as screen, or add) composite them around your image.
There is also some excellent fire footage in Digital Juice’s Compositor’s Toolkits (both 1 and 2)

– 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]

As Walter said, if you want them in 3d in AE only, you must model them in Invigorator. You can put your map of the globe on the globe and then map some metallic or simply grey substance onto the towers separately.

Or you could use a real 3d application to create the globe and towers and composite it onto the rest of your stuff with AE.

– 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]

As Dave said, I don’t really know what you want about from your brief description and I don’t remember those film’s titles at all.

But to wither your text, you might look at the Effect>Stylize>Roughen edges
Keyframing the border will get the text disappearing in a sort of withery fashion. There are tons of other things you’ll want to consider, if you’re going for a professional-looking effect. You’ll want to consider the color and if it should change, you may want to add some particles (again, I’m not sure what you’re really after here, this is just off the top of my head), and perhaps some other distortion as it withers.

(Why do I keep trying to type whithers? The third-person singular simple present indicative form of whither has nothing to do with this discussion.)

– 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.