Hi Vinnie - my favorite of the large sets are Boris BCC
http://www.borisfx.com/products/
and Tinderbox
http://www.thefoundry.co.uk/
Sapphire sets are great, but I haven't been able to afford them yet.
T_box can be bought in a 3 for the price of 2 bundle. But If you can only afford one set, I'd be torn between 2 and 3. 2 has classics like lensflare filter (phenomenal despite the disheveled interface), not to mention "Paint" which gives breathtaking results . 3 has a good diffusion filter and Turner, an organic distortion filter. T_box 1 is nice too - etch, Tile - a few filters on 1 are dated, but it's still a strong set.
Boris is come through with a ton of fine filters from classic halftone to rays (the graphics kind), a classic, to transition filters that allow you to add fractal distortions for wild effects. I think that their
updating sphere so that it animates from a flat plane to a sphere, alone makes BCC a must-have.
At any rate, here are a few of my own humble experiments:
boris
http://home.earthlink.net/~geh21post/bcc.mov
tinderbox
http://home.earthlink.net/~geh21post/tinderbox.mov
trapcode echospace
http://home.earthlink.net/~geh21post/trapcode.mov
boris2
http://home.earthlink.net/~geh21post/bcc2.mov
Trapcode Lux
http://home.earthlink.net/~geh21post/trapcode_lux.mov
