[Viacheslav Sasykin]

And also CC Mr. Mercury (may be the most appropriate plugin in this situation).
To get general impression how to use this plugin watch Andrew Cramer’s tutorial Water Drops
https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/water_drops/
Also you may want take a look at Harry J. Frank set of projects ”Best of Particular #1” on his Downloads page. There is a one among them called Fizzy. It does not look quite like fountain, more like boiling water but after some tweaking you may get something similar. Note how he used water drop created with Foam as custom particle.
And also may be Fractal Noise. And also if you have access to ParticleIllusion, check its emitters, I’m not sure but I think I saw something in there.

not a Trapcode lobbyist
🙂

[Viacheslav Sasykin]

Funny… kept this page open and answered after a while and had no idea that Carl answered by himself first. Hi, Carl! Glad I was right in some of my guesses.

[Viacheslav Sasykin]

Didn’t have time to read full article (but I definitely will, I really like everything what Carl Larsen does, how could I miss this article?) just watched final video clip. What I can say that the intro title – it is definitely Form.
Go to this page:
https://www.trapcode.com/products_form.html
and find there movie sample and project file for “Text to Sand”. Feel free to dismantle and analyze project, everything is quite simple. What you see in Carl’s video it’s the same but in reverse, let’s say, Sand to Text.
After text has assembled from the “sand” it’s noticeable that displacement was used and for that you may want to watch Eran Stern’s tutorial Smoking Letters in AE CS3 here:
https://library.creativecow.net/articles/stern_eran/The_Smoke.php
The smoke by itself and particles could be done in Particular or may be it was stock footage (Particular in good hands can work magic).
In my opinion there is a very little that Form can do and Particular can not (honestly, right now only 3D displacement comes on my mind) so…

[Viacheslav Sasykin]

Having them in SWF format makes the situation little bit more complicated.
First, you have to extract .flv video from your .swf files with help of program like Sothink SWF Decompiler (https://www.sothink.com/product/flashdecompiler/) and then as Jeremy suggested, do Google search for “flv to mov” or something like this, he is right – search will return plenty… to convert .flv to QT format (AE can eat almost everything but Avid may be quite picky about import formats)
Frankly, it all sounds like a lot of troubles to me… May be it’s gonna be faster and easier to use some screen recorder.
And also, I would ask for advice here at Flash forum, those guys may know better…

[Viacheslav Sasykin]

There is a number of ways you can do it.
You may want watch this tutorial first (by Maltaannon):
https://maltaannon.com/articles/after-effects/cgsnake/
then if you gonna have more questions ask here.
Hope it helps.

[Viacheslav Sasykin]

It is important if you have the same problem with any other of your projects or just with this particular one? If it’s just this particular one then just make your peace with it. It’s better not to touch anything in secret preferences. They are secret for the reason. Otherwise you are going to have problems with AE in general even after you return everything to its defaults, believe me.
When I say make your peace with situation I mean – render out your project in image sequence for as many frames as AE allows you before its crashes then render next frames etc. Also after crash you may want to restart your computer before next render.
It’s what I did when I’ve got in similar situation. Playing with secret preferences may help you in a sense of increasing number of frames you can render at one session before AE crashes (I mean stops rendering) but it won’t solve your problem completely. Though after sometime you are gonna be sorry that you ever heard about those secrets 🙂
If it is general problem with all of your projects then nothing comes on my mind except – uninstall your CS3, restore your system to the date before initial installation and reinstall.

[Viacheslav Sasykin]

Rain with Particular looks slightly better than generated with CC Rain, but if you are novice to Particular you will have to spend a quite some time trying to make it look better than with CC Rain. BTW, flying through the Particular’s rain you are basically zooming in into the rain streaks and it does not look good if you are going for high level of realism. For highest possible level of realism just take your camera and go shoot your scene outside when it’s raining. My point is for the most of the cases CC Rain is enough.

[Viacheslav Sasykin]

You can create rain using CC Rain filter which is already included in AE. Also there are a number of filters that are not included in AE but dedicated to rain, like T_Rain (included in Tinderbox 4 plug-in from Foundry). Why would you need Particular for that?

[Viacheslav Sasykin]

You may want to take a look at free preset available for AE called Rebel CC. Just set a white point, black point and adjust the rest according to your taste. Simple but powerful enough tool from Stu Maschwitz, one of the creators of Magic Bullet Colorista and author of “The DV Rebel’s Guide”, available for Windows and Mac. You can find it here: https://prolost.blogspot.com/2006/10/rebel-cc.html

[Viacheslav Sasykin]

It`s CS3.