[Steve Roberts]

If you can see something that should be black, and something that should be white, through the entire clip, you can use the Color Stabilizer effect.

[Steve Roberts]

Digital Fusion by eyeon.
Combustion by Autodesk.
Shake by Apple.
Motion by Apple.

But they are not as similar to AE as Premiere is similar to FCP. The first three are more for compositing (users, correct me if I’m wrong) but Motion is the closest to AE as most users use it. Though it’ may be more a complement than a competitor to AE, or a complement to FCP. Within the realm of 2D/2.5D motion graphics, AE stands alone for now.

Check ’em out.

[Steve Roberts]

CS3 is fine on my 8-core, OS10.4.11.

Leopard (or QT 7.4 if you have it) may be the problem. Have you upgraded to AE 8.0.2?

[Steve Roberts]

When you say “slow to 120fps”, you really mean “slow to 50% so it looks like 120fps”.

If you want the paint to be sharp, shoot with a fast shutter speed to avoid motion blur, which can’t be removed in post. Have lots of light available to facilitate the fast shutter speed.

Do as much testing as possible before the day of the shoot.

Imagine the paint frozen in time. Light it so it looks pretty. It’ll be shiny, so consider lighting it like a shiny product or a car, with a big softbox. If that’s an option.

I haven’t used AE’s Timewarp yet, so I recommend Twixtor as a plugin for creating intermediate frames.

In nested comps, consider slowing down the footage gradually: possibly 100% to 90%, 90% to 80%, and so on until you’re taking 60% down to your goal of 50%. Why? Because there may be a lot of drops in the air, and Twixtor might not be able to pick out a drop and follow it. Imagine a 6-spoked wheel that moves 60 degrees in each frame of footage. To the camera, the wheel is not moving. In your situation, if you go from 100% to 50% in one go, you might have some drops that apparently don’t move because one is in the same position as the next, so they’ll look weird when you slow them down: jerking back and forth for a frame or two. Anyway, read the Twixtor manual and do some testing.

[Steve Roberts]

Go to DigitalAnarchy.com. They may have something.

[Steve Roberts]

Googling terms such as:
jumper
teleport
“visual effects”
weta

… can lead to links such as this:
https://www.fxguide.com/article467.html

[Steve Roberts]

Nope, that’s it.

[Steve Roberts]

Download the trial for Twixtor, shoot some representative footage, try it out with the other options you mentioned, then compare results.

Note: time remapping doesn’t create intermediate frames. So if you slow down with it, frames will hold. If you shot at 30fps and slow down 6X, you’ll see a stuttery 5 frames in each second of running time, since you didn’t shoot enough frames (180fps) to fill the time. However, Twixtor is one way of generating those intermediate frames.

You have to shoot and test every scenario you can think of before choosing a method, and before doing any shooting with the real talent and crew.

[Steve Roberts]

Particular can use a layer as an emitter. Did you try emitting the particles from the layer emitter (the logo), and reversing the time?

[Steve Roberts]

Or … you could make an image in PS (maybe) of all the images together, and already cut out to form a “40”. It might have to be 2-3 times the screen size, depending on how clear you want the images to be when they are close to camera. Make sure the images fit a grid pattern – they all have to be the same swize and line up.

Then you’d import that image and add it to the timeline. Then you’d apply Card Dance to the image. You’d then set it up so the image is broken up along the grid, and the sections fly in along the Z axis. Check the COW for Card Dance tutorials.