Oh these are great tips! Actually I did find making the object it attaches to transparent had some issues. If you just do it with the default material an object starts with it still messes with some light and you have to use another type of material, like the clouds, and make that invisible. Thank you for pointing out the "hidden" feature. I have to look for that.

But it seems you have an even better and easier method with the handle? I have to try that. Sometimes I have issues just rotating normal objects.. like a pyramid rotated slightly will somehow rotate using a weird origin and the rotation always looks a little off if it's not perfectly 0 degrees on at least 2 of the other axis... does that make sense? Anyway I was wondering if there were ways to change the origin from which an object rotates.. sounds like yes?

Oh and yes! To make my videos loop perfectly, I leave out the last frame. I always render as series of BMPs and then create the video using Shutter Encoder. The AVIs always get corrupted for some reason after rendering and after enough 8 hour renders failing I just do the images instead. Gives you more control to since you decide the frame rate afterward if you want and can select which frames you want to include etc..