How to use Composure when using video as background with SunLight and recreated scene geometry?

Hi, just learning about Composure. I saw the UE youtube channel tutorial on using it to composite CG over image plate. It shows a great deal of what one needs to do, but I can’t seem to get this working for my case.

In my case I have real footage with moving camera, where the entire frame of the composite needs to be the full size of the footage.

I have 3D animation (well, so far not animated), where I am trying to add an animated figure, such that it is lit by similar lighting as the real footage, and whose lighting is impacted by the geometry of the real scene.

Since the scene is outdoors on bright cloudy day, I just added a SunSky actor.

As far as geometry, I made very rough geometry so that when the animated cat is in entryway, it isn’t fully lit.

Here are the issues I am seeing:

  1. The recreated scene geometry object isn’t having desired effect. What I really want is for the object to impact the lighting of the animated figure, and for the object to not be visible. If I set Actor is Hidden in Game that of course makes it not visible, but it is also then not having any impact on lighting the animated cat.

  2. Also, the video footage layer just shows last frame of the image sequence, I don’t see how to make it behave like a video, and have that footage layer in Composure actually play in sync to the Sequencer where my camera solve is.

  3. Not an issue, just curious, since the cat’s eyes are emissive, is there a way to capture those emissions so that I can composite them on the real footage? That is, capture the emissons the way they look impinged on the recreated geometry.

Here is currently how things are in UE:

The video at first shows Blender. Then my current composure setup.

Any ideas? I know all this is a bit tricky in UE, and probably better doing all the animation, compositing outside UE, but just trying to see how far I can make this work in UE, especially as UE is trying to add more support for filmmaking.

thanks!