How is the text transition done on this promo?

[Dave Johnson]

Since one of the greatest things about AE is that there are a zillion ways to do everything, the only person who can tell you precisely how that promo was made is the person who made it.

With that said, the things you mentioned that you tried seem to be pretty much it, with the main exception of the text being 3D so you would need something like Zaxwerks or BorisFX within AE for that part. It’s hard to say exactly where you might need to rework what you’ve done since you didn’t describe or show what is different with your results, but my guess is that you’re on the right track and you’re results don’t look the same because of specific settings of of the effects you used, the speed at which the action a takes place and/or the other things about the example promo yours might be missing (environment & other effects the text interacts with).

A couple general things that might help …
That effect can absolutely be done with the right settings for Radial Blur and scaling combined, but it can also be done with well-tweaked motion blur settings and camera movement or with a third-party plugin (don’t recall specifics, but Scale Wipe comes to mind as a possibility).

The speed of the text effects and other things going on in the environment the text is in are significant factors in making the promo look as good as it does. Try different things with all your settings … sometimes adjusting settings to extremes beyond what you would normally consider is precisely what you need to get the desired look.

I hope this is helpful to some degree.