Render Problems

I have come across many problems with with my cannon ball splash scene. The first problem was getting the particles of the splash to render at all. Alan showed me a renderer from a much older version of Maya, the Maya Render Buffer which has allowed me to render the particles of the cannon ball splash. The Maya Render Buffer has nearly as many function as the normal Maya hardware and software renderer we generally use. However with all these controls at my disposal, I have still had a few problems when putting the layers together. It appears that so far through my testing I have not created an alpha channel for the particles layer, there fore the particles do not appear in the scene as they should.

Having found the alpha the final text below (the 3rd clip) works out the best, however i have used the particles layer in the final render 3 times as it looked very translucent.