Paint brand: PPG, mainly because I'm familiar with the product lines and have been impressed with how it performs. This is where you choose your body man first, and then go and listen carefully to what brand he recommends and uses.
A good shop will produce a better job than you’ll get on a factory car, single stage or clear coat. When I helped a friend soot some panels about three years ago the shop we borrowed had a very sophisticated paint booth. In addition to excellent filtration it had a temperature control system that calculated wait times between coats and automatically ran the temperature up to cure the paint.
I would expect to pay at least $4,000 to $6,000 and up for a show quality shoot. Quality paint today is very expensive. Some of the exotic paints that change colors when viewed in different lighting can run $4,500 for materials alone. Red is an expensive color. It cost me over $500 in materials just to do a hood and two fenders (large hood and fenders), and that was wholesale pricing. How far do you want to go, do you want to bead blast down to bare sheet metal? Take the car apart to do it right (remove hood, fenders, doors, trunk, all trim etc., add more $$$$. After the shooting is done there are many hours involved just to color sand and buff the paint out properly. You don’t find a lot of shops doing this kind of show type paints because not many consumers are willing to pay the price in materials and labor, and they can make more doing insurance and collision repair. Sorry for the long reply, but it’s not a simple question to answer. HTH
EDIT: Here is an interesting thread that shows what $12,000 can get you:
http://www.autopia.org/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=38154
