[Walter Soyka]

If you’ve gotten a new Mac with Apple silicon, you might want to upgrade your plugins to current versions with M1 support. Otherwise, you’ll have to run Ae under Rosetta (Intel emulation), and you’ll miss out on the performance gains you could be getting with the new computer architecture.

[Walter Soyka]

You can use the Shift Channels effect to easily move luminance information into the alpha channel without precomposing. Apply Shift Channels, set “Take Alpha From” to “Luminance,” and set each of the RGB channels to “Full On.”

Now you can apply matte-refining effects in that same stack, without the need to precompose.

[Walter Soyka]

Is your footage H.264? I wonder if the issue is occurring with GPU-accelerated playback.

Do the crashes still happen if you use ProRes footage (or some other non-H.264 flavor)?

[Walter Soyka]

My whole team uses Flow to manage easing. Among other features, you can copy and paste the easings on any two keyframes from one property to another:
https://aescripts.com/flow/

[Walter Soyka]

Expressions can only affect the property they’re applied to; unfortunately, there’s no way to automatically name your comps from a dataset via either expressions or tokens.

Instead, I’d suggest you can set your project up as a template, and use a product like CompsFromSpreadsheets to drive the creation of new comps with naming controlled in a column in the dataset:
https://aescripts.com/compsfromspreadsheet/

Dataclay Templater is another option with all kinds of additional functionality:
https://dataclay.com/templater/

[Walter Soyka]

Not that I know of, but depending on what you want to accomplish, you might be able to build this with Essential Graphics precomps, adjustment layers, and the Collapse Transformations switch.

Is there a specific problem you’re trying to solve?

[Walter Soyka]

There’s no “unparent” function per se; layer objects have a parent property that is read/write, so you just need to set that to null. Assuming you have a layer object in your script called “myLayer”:

myLayer.parent = null;

[Walter Soyka]

I think the keyframe velocity-influence model is confusing, hard to learn, hard to use, and generally unfriendly to artists.

My whole team uses Flow for easing:
https://aescripts.com/flow/

It’s a much more intuitive interface, and you can easily read, store, share, and write keyframe easings across multiple properties at the same time.

[Walter Soyka]

Project file size has nothing to do with Ae’s render or interactive performance. The only noticeable effect of project file size is project open, save, and auto-save times.

You would probably benefit from building an animatic before diving into your projects. See more here:

https://www.schoolofmotion.com/blog/what-are-animatics-and-why-are-they-important

[Walter Soyka]

Use CC Environment in an extra-wide comp. Use a wide FOV for the camera. Tweak the Lens Distortion parameter in CC Environment. You can do some additional manual distortion correction with the Bezier Warp or Mesh Warp effects.