[Michael Szalapski]

No.
I don’t have time to do that. However, there are plenty of tutorials out there on the BorisFX website [LINK] and elsewhere. There’s a fairly entertaining project where Mocha was used to replace the faces of the Golden Girls in a music video and there’s a tutorial based on that that might be useful here [LINK].

Basically, once you understand how to use Mocha, you apply tracking data to a null and then use that to drive where a blur is. For example, you could tie a circle effect to the null’s position with expressions and use that circle as a matte to reveal a blurred copy of the footage. Or you could apply the Mocha tracking data as a shape to drive a mask that controls where the effect is placed using the compositing options for the effect.

Note: Mocha AE in the latest release of After Effects (version 16 – often referred to as CC 2019) has had a major update. It is now a plugin instead of an independent app. It’s also GPU-accelerated if you have the hardware for it. This page [LINK] goes over some of the new features.

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[Michael Szalapski]

Apply the tracking data to a null object and use that to drive the location of blurs/smears.

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[Michael Szalapski]

My Twitter handle is @thegreatszalam

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[Michael Szalapski]

There’s quite a bit of useful information about the differences between orientation and rotation at this page [link].

If you still have some suggestions after reading through that page, you can contact Adobe about making features easier to use by making a post at the the After Effects UserVoice page [link].

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[Michael Szalapski]

Are they both running the same version of MacOS?
Are they both running the same version of AE?

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[Michael Szalapski]

There’s a whole toolset for working with VR footage in AE: https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/immersive-video-VR.html

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[Michael Szalapski]

If you are using the latest version of Particular, you might look into using some of the new fluid effects to move your particle streams around a bit more organically.

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[Michael Szalapski]

How is the JSON being generated?
Without more information, I’d highly recommend reading through the help documentation: https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/data-driven-animations.html#WorkwithJSONfileinAfterEffects

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[Michael Szalapski]

I’m always a fan of procedural noises. Fractal Noise is probably the effect I use the most since I use it in almost every project! If your plugin can offer some different noise algorithms, I’ll be excited to try it!

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[Michael Szalapski]

Having an SSD for AE’s cache will help in some ways, yes.
More RAM is good.
Some aspects of AE will be accelerated by having a GPU. Some effects like Fractal Noise (one of my most-used effects – it’s so powerful!) are accelerated by having a GPU. Some things require a GPU like all of the VR effects as well as several third-party effects like Element.

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No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.