[Walter Soyka]

Nice! Thanks for sharing.

[Walter Soyka]

With the default keyboard shortcuts, Shift+2 will focus on the Source Monitor panel and Shift+3 will focus on the Timeline panel.

[Walter Soyka]

Yes, you’ll just have to add the height of the bounding box to the Y position:

l = thisComp.layer("My Awesome Shape Layer");
l.toComp([l.sourceRectAtTime(time).left + l.sourceRectAtTime(time).width, l.sourceRectAtTime(time).top + l.sourceRectAtTime(time).height]);

[Walter Soyka]

If you rendered a UV Material Pass from Cinema 4D, you could use a product like RE:Map to map your flat animated comps over your 3D render:

https://revisionfx.com/products/remap/

[Walter Soyka]

I would highly recommend CompsFromSpreadsheet:

https://aescripts.com/compsfromspreadsheet/

[Walter Soyka]

Unfortunately, I don’t think there is any preference that allows turning double-click-to-import off. The best I can suggest is switching your OS to a dark theme. You’ll still get the import popup, but at last you can spare your retinas a few lumens.

[Walter Soyka]

You can do this with a sampleImage() expression.

Here are a couple of quick examples that should get you started:

http://www.motionscript.com/design-guide/sample-image.html
http://www.motionscript.com/design-guide/obscuration.html

[Walter Soyka]

In Media Encoder, open up a preset and look in the the Effects tab. You’ll see features like “Name Overlay” and “Timecode Overlay” that should do what you want.

[Walter Soyka]

By default, when you nest one comp in another, Ae can resample time smoothly. It is not only limited to the frames you see stepping through that nested comp one frame at a time at its native frame rate.

However, you can override this and make comps behave exactly like rendered footage does. In a comp’s Composition Settings > Advanced window, you can check the box to “Preserve frame rate when nested.” With this box checked, Ae will only sample time from the comp on rendered frames.

[Walter Soyka]

If you’re looking for third-party add-ons, there’s also MonkeyCam (which I think is a nice step up from SureTarget):
https://aescripts.com/monkeycam-pro/

But Ae has some great new features for for working in a 3D design space that makes direct camera animation a lot easier than it was when SureTarget or MonkeyCam were developed:
https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/work-in-3D-space.html

Coupling those native features with a few wiggling nulls would make the reference animation pretty quick to develop.