I won’t pretend to have an answer for you regarding best practices, but I’ve been thinking about why you decided to use two curves, with two similar but independent paths. I would imagine it’s so you would have fine control over exactly what angle the Camera is pointing at, while still having an automatic approximate solution from frame to frame.
If it works, it works; your animation turned out very nice!
I agree that both techniques you used have their own strengths and use-cases. @FedPete’s suggestion in your other post got me thinking; when I animated the Camera for my Christmas Elf sculpt, I parented the Camera to an Empty and animated only the rotation of the Empty (didn’t have to animate the Camera at all because the use-case was simple enough). If you were to do something similar, having your Empty follow its Curve and your Camera follow the Empty as a direct child of it, I imagine that would not only synchronize the objects automatically, but also decompose your animation dimensions so they are easier to manage:
- General motion path handled by drawing the Curve and moving the Empty
- 3D rotation of the Camera handled by rotating the Empty
- Distance to Empty handled by positioning the Camera
This is more than likely what I would have tried, now that you’ve shared your technique =)