[Steve Bentley]

You can use Sketch and Toon to animate “drawn” strokes generated from geometry – but based on your animation I’m not sure if you have any geometry other than planes. Are those images on planes?
PLA animation is really only for animating points on a mesh. Its shortcoming is that it cant ease in or out at the end of the movement (you must use nulls tied to each point with xpresso and then animate the nulls instead with keyframes to over come this).

[Steve Bentley]

I’m not sure if this what you are trying to do but you can cntrl drag (copy) the UV tag to another object that has the same geometry. Any maps you ad to that new objects will map the same way the original did.

[Steve Bentley]

Which version of real flow do you have? There is a sheeting algorithm in the newer versions that makes all the difference in the look of things especially where it clings to smooth things.
As for length, I think it might take quite a while (think days) to run the mesh in RF for that length of time. As the frames increase there is more history to consider when calculating the particles so it tends to get slower as it goes. Normally you can engage a loop function but that tends to be for a fountain type arrangement where there is a constant stream of new particles being generated and old ones exiting the build zone, but in your case I think you want to generate a block of particles and then turn the emitter off.
I think you are going to have drag the attractor (or a few of them) around over time to keep the flow going. The most important factor will probably be the friction setting between liquid and sphere, too high and the liquid would rather grind to a halt. Keeping the liquid moving is also good for the illusion: as the particles settle they can wiggle as they try and find their lowest energy – you won’t see this if you keep it dynamic. There used to be “use geometry” instead of center of mass for gravity or attraction. I haven’t used that feature in a while so I’m not sure if that is still part of the package, but if it is you could use hollow arcs bigger and beyond your sphere to attract the liquid.

Another approach would be increase the friction and surface tension and then rotate the sphere in short quick bursts – the liquid will “stick” and get flung around and then flow each time the sphere stops.

[Steve Bentley]

But without seeing the project it could be a million things. Blurs slow things down as does a lot of scripting.
Does the movie have the same fps as the project and the comp? What color space are you working in and what color space is the movie rendered in?

[Steve Bentley]

What codec is your minute long movie in? If its a compressed format AE might not like it and might be hanging trying to figure out the “B” frames in the compress.

[Steve Bentley]

Or you could tie the points of the spline to nulls with xpresso and then jiggle the nulls. This also allows you to apply an over arching animation with the kind of easing you can’t do with PLA.

[Steve Bentley]

You can also turn on ambient occlusion and that will create darkness where two planes of geometry join.

Its a self shading problem, but it might also be the size (detail) of your shadow map. If the shadow map is too small it will be so soft in those small crevices it will hardly show. You could also make the non-cap geometry a separate object which would eliminate a possible self shadowing problem.

[Steve Bentley]

Each cloner will probably need its own effector. If you share the effector any offsets can’t be calculated properly for both cloners at the same time.

[Steve Bentley]

If you mean a backup project that saves as you work, you can find where that is saved in your preferences, but you will have had to set that up to begin with. Cinema changes the extension to be .c4d@sometimestamp so you would need to do an advanced search using just a partial extension, which if you had the backup save set this up is why you might not have been able to find it by type.

[Steve Bentley]

once isolated – and only for the gears that you can see edge on, you can use the offset effect to “drag” the image across the masked area and have it loop back around the other side. You can increase the illusion by putting a spherical distort set to cylinder on it so you get a little “rollover” perspective at the edges. Then finally add a motion blur, directional blur or force motion blur to the masked area in the direction of rotation (up/down or left/right)