So I decided to go ahead and jump in with a brie (as opposed to a cam, because I don't have the smaller hoops yet).
I followed the recipe in the wiki, along with a few tips here and there in the forum, and aside from a pretty quick floc time (5 min., probably too much rennet), all went well until a mechanical mishap: I was nearly done ladling the curds into the hoop when I clumsily bumped it! It didn't fall completely over, but it tilted enough to allow about a third to one half of the curd to escape from the bottom. Of course my reflex to get the hoop upright asap smooshed a bunch of curd into the mat.
It took a bit of doing, but I managed to gently scrape up the escaped curds, get them back into the hoop and exchange the mat for a fresh one.
My chief concern is that with all that agitation, the curds lost a lot of form and structure. Is this going to effect the draining time, curing time, overall moisture of the finished cheese, or anything else I should be concerned about?
Another question: is there a specific technique to flipping the hoop when its time to do the other side? Slow and easy? Quick and sharp? It seems to me very likely that the cheese could easily flip lopsided as it falls to the other end of the hoop and be demolished.