[Dan Fredley]

You can also hit Cmd/Ctrl-R to bring up the ruler, then click and drag from the ruler to create guides to see if that helps.

[Dan Fredley]

I would say a lot of motion tracking using mocha for the words on the person:

https://www.imagineersystems.com/

Then possibly Particular and/or video of real particles:

https://www.videocopilot.net/blog/2011/09/free-particle-stock-footage-tutorial/

[Dan Fredley]

It sounds like you rendered it to a multi-layer file instead of its own image sequence. You’ll either need to set up a Photoshop action to extract the object buffer to its own layer so that it becomes a pure black and white image then save it out to its own image sequence or you’ll need to render it out of Cinema 4D as its own image sequence. I would probably opt for rendering it out of C4D. Uncheck “Multi-layer file” and choose Multi-pass and add an object buffer. Then choose the number of Object buffer you would like to output. If you have more than one you’ll need to add an object buffer for each one and set the number in the single option. Then you can use these black and white image sequences as luma mattes in AE.

[Dan Fredley]

A few other tricks I use to avoid adding motion blur to the entire shot:

• Make the corner pin a little bigger than the area you want to cover.
• Corner pin a solid color underneath that matches the frame’s color WITHOUT motion blur–feather the edge to blend in with outer edge. Animate opacity and mask as needed.
• Use a slightly bigger corner pin solid color underneath that matches the frame’s color WITH motion blur–feather the edge to blend in with outer edge. Animate opacity and mask as needed.
• Isolate and color correct the green fringe using hue/saturation to be closer to the frame’s color or the image color.
• Photoshop a whole new picture frame, then corner pin the new frame along with the new photo. Roto out the fingers. Extract shadows/reflections as needed.

[Dan Fredley]

The “Linear Color Key” effect lets you pick a main color then add different shades with a color picker (has a + next to it). But the preferred built-in effect is Keylight–a little more advanced though.

[Dan Fredley]

It worked fine for me. It looks like you have curly quotes around the 30 compared to the smart quotes around the “Watch Folder Wait Time”. Make sure you open the prefs file in TextWrangler (which preserves all original values) and only change the 10, not the quote marks.

[Dan Fredley]

Animate light “intensity”, which takes the place of “opacity” for light layers.

[Dan Fredley]

Turn all Lighting and Shading properties to 0 then set Ambient to 100. Select all changed properties and save it as a preset.

[Dan Fredley]

You can set an expression on the property:
p.expression = """smooth(.2,5)""";
p.selected = true;
app.executeCommand(app.findMenuCommandId("Convert Expression to Keyframes")); //technically unsupported scripting feature
p.selected = false;

[Dan Fredley]

I was just perusing the preferences file and under a section called: [“Misc Section”] there are a couple of preferences called:

“Watch Folder Wait Time” = “10”
“Watch Folder Wait Time (first wait)” = “5”