[John Cuevas]

I’m sure lots of people can figure it out, but without access to the project, it’s impossible to know how it’s structured to be able to tell you what steps you need to go through to change it work for your needs.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

Another way is to change the property Emitter > Position Subframe. To a more exact emitter position, this does increase render position, but not nearly as much as it used to in the days of much slower computers.

Position Subframe smoothes out the movement of the particles where the emitter position is moving very quickly. In Particular 2.0, the default interpolation is linear, which means each frame is interpreted linearly. This is identical to the behavior of particles in version 1.x. If you have a slow-moving emitter, than this mode works fine because the particles are moving so fast that everything looks smooth. But if you want the emitter position to move quickly, this is a problem because you will see only a linear path. There are four options.

From the help section:

The Position Subframe pop-up
•By default, Position Subframe is set to Linear.
•10x Linear creates a new position particle at 10 subframe points in time, and then samples the position for the particle from the resulting points. This results in a more accurate position for fast-moving particles and typically is fine for everything but the fastest-moving particles.
•Set to 10x Smooth if you need the movement to distribute the points more evenly along the curve calculated at the same 10 subframe times as the 10x linear mode. This mode can give a slightly smoother motion along the path but renders at nearly the same same speed as the 10x Linear mode.
• Exact (slow) will accurately calculate the position of every particle based on the velocity of the emitter position. We don’t recommend using Exact unless you have a very few particles in the scene because this will slow down the rendering of the particle simulation considerably, especially if you are using a large number of particles in the Particles/sec control.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

Not sure what is causing your crash, smarter people than me might be able to figure that out. What I would suggest is to render to a Tiff sequence. That way, if/when it crashes you can pick right back up where it left off. If you have audio, you will have to stitch that back in AE or Premierem if not drag all the tiffs into AE or Encoder and render to your final format.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

I get the same thing, why not use a shape layer, or mask with stroke?

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

Being that you state you are new, I would strongly suggest you start here:

Getting started with After Effects (CS4, CS5, CS5.5, CS6, & CC)

Here are a couple of reflection tutorials:

I think this light glow tutorial will help you out.

https://img.videocopilot.net/tutorials/light_glow/

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

Check out this tutorial as Video CoPilot: Earth Zoom. Set it up like he does, then if you are having too many decimal points, you can always throw in an extra null, and parent to that and start scaling again.

Another approach would be to just set up everything in Z space, and just move a camera through it.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

Are you sure you have set the life cycle correctly for your textured particles…random freeze frame should be a pretty safe one.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

Getting started with After Effects (CS4, CS5, CS5.5, CS6, & CC)

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

Chris is right, a feathered mask will probably be the easiest approach for this and and would be very effective. I’ve uploaded a project using a luma matte method that you may find a bit more organic. I didn’t have a great smoke wipe, so I created one from a static smoke charge, so please overlook the edges.

Step 1 – Create a smoke comp and add a levels effect to blow out the whites and crush the blacks, this is the layer that will drive the wipe. When we drop it into the final comp the black areas will allow the text to be visible, and the white areas will cause remove the opacity.(In my case I have 2 smoke comps, one with levels effect, one without since I had to create smoke wiping across the screen).

Step 2 – Created a final comp and bring in both my smoke layers. Add two text layers. Duplicate the Smoke Levels Layer and place it above both layers of text. Now just change the text track mattes to “Luma Matte Inverted”. Place the normal smoke layer as the top layer and change it’s transfer mode to “Add”. When the smoke was at it’s fullest I quickly animated the opacity keyframes of the text layers to switch between the two.

Take a look at the project I created, hopefully it gives you a good starting point for you own project. 6911_breakingbadfolder.zip

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

Just some 1 frame cuts, any edit system can do them.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.