forgot to mention thanks for the help y’all. What I ended up doing was making a pile of bills illustration in AI, animating one bill, and then parenting the other bills to it by expression (adding delay and position changes). It looks good.
Reloading footage is no problem, I do it all the time.
About color management: I changed the Working Space in Color Settings to “sRGB IEC61966-2.1”. So now all footage is being interpreted as sRGB. Nothing has changed, though.