Direction work flow on this please



Hi All,
Thanks for looking in. I am about to add a couple of assets to my scene. Where I need to add a particle emitter that will emit smoke and I also have a keyed actor in the scene.
I want to have the smoke emitter engulf my actor. I plan on using a PNG seq of my keyed actor. Should I use a PNG sequence of the emitter too? Once I do that I go into 2d and will lose the engulfing of smoke of my keyed actor though. Unless there is a stacking layer in Blender I am unaware of? Where I can sandwich my Png actor between to Two Smoke Png sequences to appear engulfed…
Which do know would be the better direction or workflow on this one? As it is now without adding these other two assets I am at a 90 second render per frame…

Add the emitter into my transporter scene render out with smoke and then add my actor? OR add actor and emitter for one render out?

OR render out scene and sandwich PNG’s ?

Any good video tuts you have come across would be appreciated a link to. I keep coming across UV unwrapping associated with PNG Sequence import as a syntax.