After Effects

I am migrating my multi-application video editing workstation to a new laptop. Not having a way to migrate my After Effects settings, workspaces, plugins, and scripts is incredibly disappointing and frustrating. It’s even more upsetting to see this used to be possible in After Effects a few years ago through the “Sync Settings” feature. Please add this feature back. Thank you. 

This strategy of dropping new features unannounced into a beta release isn't good enough. There seems to be a growing disconnect between users' needs and what Adobe is actually doing, and honestly it feels like the overall strategy is driven entirely by marketing people and has nothing to do with our requests or modern needs.Look at this forum, there are YEARS of requests ignored and bug reports coming up again and again.  Every update just feels arbitrary at this point. The rotobrush improvements were great, but a long time coming. I often think AE is going to go the same way as Animate because it already feels like a legacy product because of such a profound lack of innovation - or maybe you have big plans for it? It would be nice to know. 

I'm sure this has been posted before on here, but for visibility and emphasis how does AE not have a relinking system like Premiere after 10+ years?? I'm working on a particular project where despite all the assets being scattered across mutliple folders on a server, AE insists as relinking one by one. Most times I don't have this issue as it finds them on it's own, but for whatever reason it's going very slow, manually relinking file by file. This is on a collected project. Regardless of the reason or situation, it wouldn't be an issue if we had a relinking system like Premiere's file manager for footage. Is there some technical reason Adobe hasn't addressed or improved such an important function on large AE projects after a decade??

In after Effects, it is easy to drag a layer in time. For compositing, this can give problems, when it happens accidentally. Please make a ‘smpte’ lock - that keeps Layers on their time whatever happens. The current layer lock locks all modifications - that is not suitable to prevent time change, while working on color and effects.

I do a lot of UX Motion work, and often times, need to do icon animations at a 1:1 for what engineers will output. I understand that AE is a tool that renders pixels, but it would be fantastic if there were a way to continuously rasterize vector assets within a comp. Sometimes, we’re working at 24px x 24px comps.  So jumping from Figma to AE can be a pain. I understand the reasons behind “why” we cap out the zoom and why I see the aliasing, but without jumping to another tool like Rive, it would be fantastic for AE to just let me see as clean as I can.. even if its incredibly limited in its use case.Vectors only? Does it disable if I add a raster image? What happens if I add an effect? I’d imagine it would also need to disable as well. Would be great if it didn’t. ​​​ TLDR: Rive and Figma have spoiled me on seeing vectors crisply in a viewport… and given the amount of UX work I do, it would be fantastic if AE could offer the ability to do the same, even if it weren’t available in ever

WEBM export

When deleting a layer which is being used for an essential property, the following warning is shown. However, there’s no way to do a reverse ‘Reveal in Timeline’ command to see where a layer might be connected to a comp’s EGP.It would be enormously helpful if this alert could list the comp(s) that would be affected by the layer deletion. 

I run a lot of script panels in my standard workspace, and often get popup dialogs stating things like:‘Unable to execute script at line 828. Execution halted’or‘Script cannot run while a modal is waiting for a response’.It would be really helpful when trying to identify which script is throwing an error if the popup dialog box that contains the error put the script name into the header bar, which at the moment is blank.Currently, diagnosing which script is causing an error requires clearing the workspace then adding things in one at a time, which can become very time-consuming. This change would remove a lot of that time, which means we can spend it on animation instead :)Example visualSummary: When a script error occurs, please add the name of that specific script into the popup error dialog to aid identification.

Please provide options to use the old UI contrast settings or allow detailed adjustments for the 2025 UI contrast.The contrast between the background and text is very strong.I especially don't want pure white to be used for text. Since I have weak eyes, the new UI is too stimulating.I feel that other users will also experience eye strain when looking at the new UI for extended periods.Additionally, the gray UI is too bright and feels strange.At minimum, we need options to adjust settings like the brightness of text highlights.

In Premiere, when files lose their link, relinking opens a dialog showing a path from where the missing file was originally located. Whether for better organization, moving to a different location or renaming a file, files lose their links and need to be relocated. After Effects should use a similar dialog as Premiere when relinking lost files. The ability to see the path a file was originally stored in is a good indicator as to where I should start looking. Sometimes it's in the same location but the name was changed. other times, seeing the former path triggers a reminder that I moved the associated files to a new location and I know where to go look. This would speed production quickly locating lost or missing files. Additionally, I think being able to click on a primary "Projects" directory or hard drive where most of your work is saved, would use the computer to search all folders embedded inside rather than the user having to locate the specific file path - wh

In Premiere when you relink footage there's a progress bar, which is useful, because it can take a long time. In After Effects, there is no such feature. After Effects is clever, in that if you use 'replace footage' to relink an asset that is offline, then After Effects automatically looks for, and replaces other offline footage with the same relative path. But... there's no progress bar. If a project has a large number of assets offline, then relinking just one can make AE hang for a long time, with no indication of how long it will take to finish, and uncertainty whether the program's still running or has crashed, as it is unresponsive. I'm currently trying to link offline assets in a project with a thousand or so assets offline, and after half an hour of AE 'not responding', I still don't know if that's because it's crashed or because it's just taking a long time to relink. A progress bar when replacing offline footage would be very welcome.

When collecting files via Dependencies > Collect Files, I often have to then provide the output of that as a .zip file.It would be helpful if there were an option in the Collect Files dialog to choose to zip up the contents of the collect (either instead of the collect folder, or in addition to it).

Dynamically being able to set the height and width of a text layer iwth an expression will simplify and reduce layers and comps in complex projects, imporving Render and organization challenges. thanks!

The After Effects SDK currently exposes keyframe times through A_Time, which represents time as an integer number of ticks. This limits plug-ins to the precision of the current tick resolution when retrieving or setting keyframes.For example, at a time scale of 30,720 ticks/second, a keyframe at 13.947372 ms corresponds to 428.46 ticks. However, A_Time can only represent 428 ticks, resulting in a retrieved time of approximately 13.932292 ms and an error of about 15 µs.I would like to request that the After Effects SDK provide a higher-precision mechanism for both retrieving and setting keyframe times, allowing times to be represented at sub-tick precision.Ideally, this could be provided through new versions of APIs such as AEGP_GetKeyframeTime() and AEGP_InsertKeyframe(), or through an equivalent high-precision time type/API.

It would be nice if the Custom OCIO Configuration setting respected relative paths like normal media in After Effects. The bonus is cross-platform compatibility when using custom configs without having to wipe out and reset OCIO effect layers on every OS change.

Frankly, this is far too outdated.Shape layers should be rendered on the GPU to achieve significantly faster performance.

Hi there!.We do a lot of text manipulation via scripting and we would love to be able to convert from / to point and paragraph texts.The feature exists in AE, but it's not available in ExtendScript. Thanks!.

right click on the Comp Window header > Enable Auto-keyframe: Why is this Stop Watch not visible all the time to toggle on/off?thanks for reading and thumbs up 🙂

I’d love to see a method added to the scripting API to be able to run the Dependencies > Collect Files command, with its various options.A bonus would be if you’re also (optionally) able to zip up the contents of the collect via scripting (as described in this linked post). 

Something that happens EVERY time we use EXR sequences in After Effects, we have to right-click on the footage (there is no File menu equivalent)Interpret Footage->Main and then select the color tab and "Preserve RGB". It would be super helpful to be able to set these values in these sub tabs with a script event that can be accessed with the scripting language or Automation Blocks system.

After Effects has become an apalling mess and Adobe is a joke of a company.  Why on earth are the new features etc., being driven by your marketing department instead of what users want and need?  We're in a ridiculous position where updating After Effects with the hope of fixing one lot of bugs just introduces a whole load more.  Can someone with a bit of backbone at Adobe suggest to their bosses that they are f***ing the company?  The ONLY reason I still have CC is because they offered me money off when I went to cancel, but I'm slowly shifting my workflow away from Adobe completely because they cannot make a decent piece of software.  Adobe, please DO YOUR JOB so that I can do mine!  

I find myself tweaking some effects over and over in the same way. Yeah, we can save an ‘Animation Preset’ (a confusing name). But I would like to have a simple button to set the current status of an effect to be default, so the next time I apply it, it will be automatically featuring these settings 

I've been playing with the unreal engine server plugin in Nuke and it is really useful. You can link to unreal engine and render passes from the nuke interface as well as update camera lights etc and then comp. Really useful and would be great to have in after effects. Thanks 

We need a simple 3D tool in After Effects to create basic polygons/planes between points—for example between Nulls or 3D Camera Tracker points.Right now AE can solve a camera and generate 3D points, but it’s missing the next essential step: quick proxy geometry. For even a few simple surfaces we’re forced to roundtrip to a 3D app, which breaks the workflow.Why this matters?Fast proxy surfaces are crucial for: shadow catching / contact shadows projection mapping (projecting a plate onto simple cards/planes) quick set-extension cards and grounding elements RequestAdd a Create Face / Create Plane from Points tool: select 3 points → create a triangle select 4 points → create a quad keep it editable (move vertices / reassign to points) optional: Shadow Catcher surface mode + Project From Camera helper This would make AE far more practical for real 3D compositing workflows.thx

Currently the only way to see if some footage/asset is used, is to select it in the Project panel where it says “footageName, used # times”. To check many assets, the fastest way is to click on the first one and bash the arrow key on your keyboard. Not very efficient when I hear computers are pretty good at counting quickly (unless the AI is hallucinating—but that’s another story 😬) Adding an additional panel column that says how many times an asset is used would be much faster. I attached a quick mockup of how it could look—being able to shrink the column very narrow would be key since—for most uses—it’ll be single or double digit number. This would be very handy when you have a collection of assets to somewhat randomly use throughout a project, like a graphics package with several variants of a kind, or building a collage with random shapes, precomped pieces of text, etc. and you don’t want to use some assets too much or too little. Or simply to get a sense of