Transparency in After Effects?

[Steve Roberts]

Since you didn’t mention which effects are giving you trouble I’ll take a stab at it: apply effect>image control>grow bounds above the troublesome effect in the effects stack and adjust its settings until the effect grows.

Other than that, we’d need specifics.

Steve

[Dan Blaim]

You may want to try pre-composing your text layer.

Select your text layer and goto layer menu. Select pre-compose.
be sure to remove the effect that is causing the problem first.
Selecting move all attributes will keep all keyframable actions with the original file.

This will create a new composition that is the same size as the original composition.
and the original text layer is now a composition.

Now all effects will be bounded by the edges of the composition not the text itself.