[Walter Soyka]

The Mode and Track Matte columns are adjustable as a group, not as individual columns. There’s a a subtle vertical line just to the right of the Alpha/Luma and Inverted Matte icons that you can grab and drag to resize.

[Walter Soyka]

Ae ships with an effect called “CC Kaleida” that’s built specifically for that kaleidoscopic/mandala look.

[Walter Soyka]

Matthew, here’s some documentation on running After Effects under Rosetta emulation:
https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/kb/after-effects-apple-silicon.html

To directly answer your question, if even one of your installed plugins is Intel-only, you have to run Ae under Rosetta emulation.

[Walter Soyka]

If you right-click any of the column headers in the timeline panel, in the context menu, you can choose Columns > In and Out. With the In and Out columns visible, you can directly enter timecode or frame numbers for the in and out points. (You’ll also have to use the square brackets to adjust the start point of the clip in the timeline itself.)

[Walter Soyka]

It hasn’t been removed, but it might be hiding.

You’re probably looking at the new Properties panel, which dynamically shows you properties of the selected layer. I don’t see the faux styles there either, even when you click the “… More” button underneath the first set of character properties.

Instead, you’ll have to look in the Character panel. If you still don’t see them there, they might be clipped off the bottom of the panel. Grab the bottom of the Character panel and drag it down until you see the faux styles.

[Walter Soyka]

You get two users, five projects, and 100 GB of storage included with Creative Cloud.

[Walter Soyka]

On raw video formats, the debayering settings are properties at the footage level, and located in the Interpret Footage settings.

I think that to do what you’re describing in After Effects, you’d actually want to duplicate the footage item, once for each different raw/debayering setting, use Interpret Footage to change the settings, then stack/mask/composite as you wish.

It’s not a very interactive process. If your footage really isn’t clean enough to manage from a single debayering pass, I’d probably be more inclined to pre-process the video in your color tool of choice, output your multiple passes, and then comp.

[Walter Soyka]

There are a couple of Premiere features that might make your life easier:

1. When you export, if you have “Use Previews” checked, Premiere will NOT force a re-render of any rendered sections of your timeline. It will preferentially use any current, already-rendered sections from your scratch disk.

This would let you apply your effects and render them (via the Sequence menu, then Render Effects In to Out [the hotkey is Enter], Render In to Out, or Render Selection) as you choose. What you see in your timeline will be exactly what you’ll get in your output, so you’ll be able to see any render issues immediately while you’re working.

Premiere is also capable of “smart-rendering” certain formats like ProRes. If your preview file format matches your output file format, Premiere will just copy the rendered frames without re-encoding. It’s fast, and there’s no generational quality loss.

Here are the docs:
https://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/using/bestpractices-export.html

2. The “Render and Replace” feature allows you to select clips on the timeline, render them with any effects you have applied, and replace the clip instance with the rendered media, via right-click or Clip > Render and Replace. (In other words, it’s kind of a more automated version of what you’re already doing.) One big benefit to Render and Replace, though, is that at any time, you can restore the original, unrendered clip and effect stack via right-click or Clip > Restore Unrendered.

Here are the docs:
https://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/using/render-replace-effects-compositions.html

[Walter Soyka]

Adobe bought Frame.io, so you could use that in place of Vimeo. The basic process is fundamentally the same, but the “Review in Frame.io” panel has some nice integration that connects your edit to the online review version. You can link the playheads so your Premiere playhead jumps right to the comments as you click through them. You can import comments as markers into Premiere. You can even have Premiere encode and upload the file from the Review panel — you never have to leave Premiere, or touch a file in Finder or Explorer.

Here’s some basic info from Adobe:

https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/video/review-and-collaboration.html
https://helpx.adobe.com/x-productkb/multi/collaborate-frameio-premiere-pro.html

If you want to cut the render/upload piece entirely, you can do live reviews with your client. Zoom screen shares are cheap at the expense of quality, or you can use a more expensive, lower-latency, higher-quality streaming service like SetStream.io, Streambox, Sohonet, or Colorfront.

[Walter Soyka]

Sounds like you want to switch among multiple camera angles and add a few repeated PIP layouts?

In cases like this, I like to build each layout as its own sequence, running the entire duration of the footage. Next I’ll render each layout out, re-import the renders, drop them in a multi-cam sequence with the full-frame sources, and finally use the multi-cam feature to cut.