Also got a RAM upgrade. Maybe After Effects will not crash this time.

No candles this time, since most of the celebration was done on Friday by going to a bar.

Good time that was.

I should've expected the video to end up super compressed. So, here's a YouTube link to properly showcase it.
youtu.be/rxr7MshPjzo

Granted, it's not perfect. There are some areas (such as his shirt) where it looks like a painting like filter has been applied.

This filter look is much more prevalent in the grey background sources (mainly, in his beard). And I'll try to fix that with the grey background sources.

With After Effects, I can't tell if it has always been recourse intensive, or if it has gotten more bloated over the years (or both).

Also, how did you manage to edit & export 4K on that iMac?
I can only imagine AE was as slow as whenever I tried to edit something in AE on my old £200 HP laptop.

Makes me wonder what you were working with when making this originally.

For all I know, you could be still using the same computer now.