[Michael Szalapski]

You might want to ask this in one of the COW’s Final Cut forums.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

Adobe has provided a help file with your software and an even more updated online version of it for your convenience. In it, you may find your answer.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

I think it unlikely that a plug-in has suddenly gone feral, however it certainly does seem to have done so in your case.

Let’s see if we can isolate the issue.

Try copying that layer, starting a new project, creating a new composition and pasting that layer in. Does the new project hang once you enable motion blur too?

If so, try creating a new project, new composition, new layer and apply CC Particle World to it. Leaving the effect at its default settings, turn on the motion blur options. Does it hang now?

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

You can move your layers around in Z space if you want. Sure, move the top one back in Z-space and all the little children will follow it, but then move the next on and the next one until you have them all where you want them. As long as you start with the topmost parent, you’ll be fine.

Basically that expression is telling AE to make that layer’s rotation do what the other layer’s rotation does, but to wait a bit before it does it. The slider tells it how long to wait before it starts doing what the other layer did.

The first part of the expression tells the rotation value to be the rotation of a certain layer (in this case, you’re specifying it’s parented layer).
valueAtTime tells it to pull the value from a certain time
time-thisComp.layer("Expression Control").effect("Offset")("Slider") tells it that the certain time is the current time minus whatever number the slider is sitting at.

Does that make sense?

You might want to check out the expressions section of MotionScript.com. It’s a site full of amazing stuff written by the genius known as Dan Ebberts.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

As far as I know, you can’t change the opacity of individual pieces in Shatter.
If your effect is using a custom shatter map, you could create a composition based on it with each piece white (we’ll call this precomp Opacity_Map).
Use the Opacity_Map precomp (as a track matte) to control the opacity of your layer that you want to shatter.
Precompose the Opacity_Map and your layer (we’ll call this new precomp Shatterable).
Apply your shatter effect to the Shatterable precomp.
Then in your Opacity_Map precomp you can animate the pieces from white to black.

It’s not perfect, it will take a while to set up and it’s certainly not automated, but at least you can make your pieces dissappear.

Just out of curiousity, why do you want to do this? Perhaps someone may have an alternate effect you might try.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

Wait; I thought of something else! You say AE “freezes”?
Well…you could try pushing caps lock before you open the comp. Having caps lock on keeps AE from rendering anything.
If it’s still going well, turn off the eyeball on all the layers. Then turn caps lock off.
If all is still well then one of those dang little layers is your problem child. Turn them each back on until it all dies. The layer you were turning on when it dies is the culprit!
Reopen everything (with Caps Lock on) and try to find out what RAM or CPU hogging thingy that layer is doing.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

Unless you’re wildly swinging the camera about, I doubt there’s too much camera movement. It’s probably just a bad track. Try retracking the shot and managing it more carefully. There is an artistry and frequently some hard work involved in accomplishing a flawless track; practice makes perfect.

What kind of camera move are you doing? There are movements that you can’t do in AE and have them look good because it’s only a 2d track.

Keep in mind that subtle is better. A normal hand-held camera shot instead of a tripod should be enough to sell the shot.

Also, if you’re using a wide angle for the shot, you could have an issue of lens distortion at the edges of your picture; either compensate for it with optical correction effects on the original footage or the set extension. (Or shoot with less distortion by switching lenses or, if it’s a fixed-lens camera, zoom in a bit to narrow the focal length.)

Here’s a tutorial on set extensions that you may, or may not, have seen.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

There is no default background for a composition. It is empty. When you toggle that little button at the bottom of your comp window, you’re merely changing how AE shows you the nothingness; black or checkerboard. Therefore when you drop a comp into another comp, any place where there is nothing, nothing will show.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

As far as enabling all cores of your processor goes, with a quad-core processor and only 4 gigs of RAM you do NOT want to try to have AE use all cores of your processor. AE needs 2 Gb per core MINIMUM to run well. No matter whether your current issue with that composition gets fixed or not, you need to get more RAM ASAP! (Here’s a post from Adobe After Effects employee, Todd Kopriva, on RAM in AE.)

As far as your project goes I, personally, don’t want you to attach a file. It came from a computer with a “wicked little trojan” running around on it and as cleaned up as it may be, I still don’t want to risk it on my PC.

As far as opening that composition goes; try disabling all OpenGL settings in AE and make sure your graphics card has the right drivers for Windows 7 before you open it again.

Also, as previously mentioned, you should disable multi-processing as you do not have enough RAM to even attempt it. You may think “4 Gb RAM, 2 RAM per core; I’ve got enough for two cores to run, idiot!” But I’m not as much of an idiot as I may look; Windows 7 uses up quite a bit of RAM itself – over a Gig usually – and any other programs you’re running will take up RAM too. I assume you’re running some sort of anti-virus software now…

If that doesn’t work, I’m out of suggestions. Others may still have ideas though. Or it’s possible that your file, in all the nastiness, got corrupted. It could have been worse; at least all the other compositions work!

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Michael Szalapski]

Try duplicating your footage twice so you have three layers.
On the top layer apply the Find Edges effect and use it as a luma track matte for the middle layer which is blurred. These two would be over an unaffected bottom layer.

How’s that?

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.