[Michael Smith]

Found out the issue. I had an ‘appearance’ object activated on a path. I had to clear this in order to stop the shape of the layer from affecting the color of other objects.

[Michael Smith]

I found some useful ideas from your link to linking and parenting. As far as sorting out layers for optimal performance I learned to divvy up my project into separate compositions and have them all linked in the ‘project’ tab. This seems to work for me. Thank you, Hector. ‘Sorry to check out for a while