After Effects

It’s 2025. I open After Effects and… it feels like I’m still working in 2013.While Blender, Unreal Engine, Houdini, and even newer tools like Cavalry are evolving with bold updates, After Effects has barely moved. Every time a new version drops, it’s disappointing to see tiny improvements disguised as “major features.” It’s as if Adobe is keeping the program on life support without actually developing it.Let’s call it out:Graph Editor – still outdated, clunky, and untouched for over a decade. No real-time preview, no modular behavior, no intelligent UI. No modern easing tools – no built-in bounce, elastic, inertia, or overshoot. You still need to rely on Expression tricks or 3rd-party scripts for basic animation finesse. No native effectors or procedural animation tools – while tools like Cavalry, Cinema 4D, and Notch offer real-time procedural workflows and effectors, After Effects is stuck in manual keyframes and precomp hell. Still no native IK (inverse kinematics) –

every time a change is made, the program automatically saves the project. to prevent work loss every time after effects crash

I had to do some digging on the internet on setting an output module as a default so it always shows up in the Render Queue. The steps are: Clicking the down arrow next the "Output Module" to bring up the list of output templates. Command+Click (Mac) or Control+Click (PC) the template you want to be default. Look for the confirmation in the Info paul that says "Default Movie Output Module set to:..." Devs, please acknowledge that this is esoteric UI and UX. This could be done a lot better, don't you think? What if the user doesn't have their Info panel open? How are they going to know the default was set? In the evolutionary timeline, programs like Photoshop are evolving into mammals with modern UI and UX while After Effects remains a dinosaur. I encourage you to take fresh look at the program and how efficiencies can be made and tasks can be more straight-forward.

This is a "simple" request (is it really?) with a lot of applications for me.  I would like to be able to access the verticies of a text box via expressions the same way I can access them in a shape layer.  I do a lot of lower third mogrts, and this would make it a whole lot easier to make more sophistcated graphics.  I have been using MATH and sourceRectAtTime.  It would be nice to have direct access rather than sort of "linking" like this.  

Simple as that.  I work in a team of editors in both my full time job and my freelance work, so I'm often working in the latest (read least stable) version of AE. I'm sick of only having a tiny window per year where things actually work properly before this year's new version breaks it all again.  It's too much for me and obviously too much for Adobe. 

This already exists in Premiere Pro, being able to mark effects as favourites by copying them into a custom 'bin' (folder) for easy access.

After Effects' Displacement effect is 2D (x/y only), but with the new GLTF/FBX support, we can achieve proper 3D displacement in C4D or Blender, and import them into AE to animate lights, cameras, and other elements. But we cannot do that with animated displacement, so it's pretty limited. This is what we could have if AE got a proper 3D Displacement mode: https://superhivemarket.com/products/video-depth-ai

This is a simple UX change that would help a ton. When I am in a shape layer, and have a specific group or shape selected, hitting a shortcut key (Like R, S, or T) should open the parameters for that specific group or shape. Not the entire layer.  This would help workflows a bunch! Thanks!

hello i need a way to enable the hotkey of this command that drives me crazy, forward/backward 1 frame. help me to do it, if it is not possible to do it is there a plugin to do it? has anyone solved or can guide me? my broken fingers will thank you forever.   Title edited by Mod.

I'm a visual media coordinator in a university and am responsible for maintaining our brand identity via all of the content creators we work with. I'd like to be able to use the Adobe libraries for this, as it's useful to be able to share with selected users and also offer editable templates like lower thirds, titles etc.I'm trying to create MOGRTS with some updated branding but am unable to upload any of our new brand assets because there is a 1GB filesize limit. The videos we have use transparencies for transitions so I need to use the ProRes 4444 + alpha codec. I can just about manage with a couple of short 1080 HD assets but there's no chance with the 4k/UHD assets as the idents are around 5GB for a few seconds of footage.Is this something that can be addressed? My only option now is to dump everything on cloud storage, but them I lose the control over users and how they use the assets, plus I can't keep everything relevant and up to date. This 1GB filesize limt just seems like a l

It would be great to have the ability to reshape a Paragraph Text box, using the Pen tool, like I can in many other Adobe apps. User @TheYates wanted to do this a few years ago (see this post: https://community.adobe.com/t5/after-effects-discussions/text-inside-custom-path/m-p/12566397) and I've often had to resort to multiple text boxes, adding returns (a pain when I've set some paragraph spacing) etc. which is far from ideal, especially when we do not have any kind of character/paragraph styles (which would also be incredible to have) to easily apply a style to several text boxes.

I would love if I could pin my guide layer to the top layer of my composition as Layer 1. As I bring in footage and elements it moves down.  I'm sure people also have reasons to pin things to the bottom, or multiple layers in multiple places too.  

It always feels odd when you collect a file and you assets are in a folder called "footage". I and many other motion designers call there folder that they store any and all assets "Assets". The first thing that comes to mind when I see Footage is film/video assets and not stills or Audio. It would be cool to have in that dialogue box the option to change the Footage folder name to whatever you want rather than doing it everytime after the fact. 

My animation team as well as myself, have been begging for this feature for a really long time. We are constantly, accidentally clicking on our Work-Area bar, offsetting a couple of frames on a few occasions, and then sending for render, only to discover our opening fade in is half-way through it's transition, or our end is now too long and we have content disappearing. We desperately would like to have the ability to right click on the work-area bar and select "lock". This would maybe put some strikethroughs over the range, similar to a locked layer in Premiere, do show that we can't make adjustments. If you click and try to set it it could say "would you like to unlock and make changes?", or you could right click and "unlock". Huge timesaver for those fire-drill projects that cause the stupid mistakes.Thanks!

This is currently hidden in the Timeline panel > Effects. Adding it to the Effect Controls panel will make it more obvious to users. Most people do most of their effects fiddling within the Effect Controls panel than in the timeline. (Probably?) This should be added at the bottom of every effect (like the current placement in the Timeline panel.), and default to closed to save vertical space. (See attached mockup) Putting it at the top might make someone think these render/calculate before the effect. Setting Compositing Options’ Effect Opacity to 0% renders/calculates faster (as in, always 0ms) than similar parameters within effects that control their own opacity, like “Blend With Original”. (In my limited testing &#x1f605 )

Hi,This is going on for years and I dont get it - why AE is asking us TWICE, in two separate dialogue windows, wheter we want to import the asset as a composition, or footage? So annoying! At least when You choose "footage" there's no additional dialogue necessary, with "compostion" i get it - there are some additional options regarding layer styles from PS.

felizmente tive esse problema resolvido!  basta ir no suporte da adobe e conversar com um agente e ele te mandará a versão que deseja. muito obrigado pela atenção e respeito adobe! Observação de melhoria: sugiro que deixem as versão mais antigas disponíveis mais facilmente (exemplo: after effects 2023, 22, 21, 20...)

Hi all 🙂 Relinking / replacing media is a core function to all of our workflows - a near daily part of our experience with this software. Personally, my time is split roughly between Adobe After Effects and Adobe Premiere, and one very robust feature of the relink/replace media experience in AP is the "Display only exact name matches" check box in the link media dialog box. If this is checked, the only clip shown to the user is the one with the matching name as the file in the project.  By comparison, when I perform replace/relink in AE I feel like I'm hot wiring a car. For those unfamiliar with Adobe Premiere's Link Media interface, there is this preliminary dialog that provides a very robust  set of preferences for how AP seeks to automate relinking once the user has selected the first file. Are you jelly yet, AE users?I've been thinking of this for years, and am finally writing this to the community in the hope of getting this upgrade!To ma

Show sequences as one file in explorer when importing. Numerous other animation softwares have had this feature for over 10 years., e.g. 'Nuke'. Massive waste of time when importing. Such a basic function. Would benefit litereally every user.

Adobe, could you please let us change the size of the handles in the graph editor? I have to click 10 times just to hit the right spot.

Hello, I love the minimax effect, but I can't change the shape of the kernal of it, I think the default one is square.changing the shape of the kernal will allow some cool techniques.for example rounding corners very fast and without changing the original edges size, without using the normal way of bluring and then crushing alphas and shrinking edges back.for example making closing operation(minimum then maximum) with a spherical kernal will smooth corners.also it will preserve the edges shape when using the normal minimum and maximum operation such as circle and curves.Thank you for reading😊.

I often have keyframes in a precomp that need to be adjusted while looking at the result of those keyframes in another comp (this is more often than not in AE). We can step frame by frame or jump around and see what we need to see, but we cannot scrub or play and have both comps play back or scrub, so there is a lot of back and forth. I'd love it if there were an option to lock playheads and preview/scrub multiple comps simultaneously to speed this workflow up.

Currently, it's not possible to read a layer's comment or label in an expression*. It would be helpful to be able to access these via something like 'layer.comment' or 'layer.label'. This would allow, for instance, changing a layer's colour based on the comment text or the label.(*If I've missed something and this is possible, I'll happily be proven wrong!)

I'd love to have a mode where moving a layer with the arrow keys and/or dragging it around is snapped to full pixel values. Snap to grid works for dragging, but a single pixel-per-square grid is so dense that you cannot easily see the image underneath while it is on, and you need to zoom all the way in to make sure it is snapping correctly. 

We really need Pro Import back to work with AAF files. I know it was removed. I heard they'd be adding it back but I still dont see it. How are we supposed to work with industry standard AAF files without it?----Update, I made this request back in Dec 2023. An Adobe employee said it would be returning in future versions but we still don't have it back. This feature is vital to compatibility with industry workflows.---------  nishu_kushAdobe Employee , Dec 18, 2023Copy link to clipboard Hi naves31200335, Are you on macOS or Windows? If on macOS, this option was removed a few years back. Sorry about that.On Windows, the option is not available in the current version. The team is aware of this and it should come back in future releases. Meanwhile, you can either use the 2023 version or copy the ProImport folder from C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe After Effects 2023\Support Files\Plug-ins\Format over to C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe After