After Effects

As it stands, there’s no easy method to export a single frame from multiple comps. The only Time Span options that can be saved to Render Setting templates are Length of Comp and Work Area. I’d like options such as:First FrameLast FrameA specific frameCustom durations for movies If I could add a handful of comps to the render queue and choose one of my templates set to “Last Frame”, that would be very convenient than manually opening each comp and using Save Frame As.

There must be a reason that After Effects can only have one project open at a time, but this  is the single biggest issue for me. Importing comps is messy, it often ends up importing the entire project. Every other program I use allows to copy and paste between projects within the app, and even between apps (Ae to Pr, PS, Ai, Ai to PS...) but Ae doesn’t allow this seemingly simple feature. Thank you.

Sometimes I need to align many key frames of same layer or even another layer to the same momment in timeline, well you can select keyframes in same vertical level and align all of them to the same second…  

How can we pay so much for Adobe products and we cannot do simple hair animations with After Effects, considering that free apps can do this (with use limitations, but still). When we will have that available for us to use? And without that credits crap that Firefly is trying to pull on us? Why, instead o making our lives easier and less angry using AE, we still need to use mesh tool to animate hair? How Adobe's AI didn't reach out to this level of technology yet for the users?

Timeline folders. We have them in Animate, Photoshop, Illustrator... precomps can utterly ruin your work and is NOT an alternatives to having a simple folder hierarchy - especially when dealing with shape layers or anything that requires continual rasterization.

Many years ago, I did a request on the now-defunct AE uservoice for the opposite of a ‘guide layer’ - a ‘render only’ layer, for this situation:If I have an effects-heavy adjustment layer that I don’t want to preview because it’s so slow, I’ll turn it off in my comp. Then when I’m happy, I’ll set the comp to render. I’ll then check that exported .mov/mp4/etc, and get annoyed because I then realise that I forgot to turn that adjustment layer back on before I set it rendering, so I then have to do another render.Sound familiar? If we could set a layer to “render only”, then it would remain turned off until we did the final render. The exact opposite of a Guide Layer.Let’s get this upvoted and implemented (after all these years!!).This is along the lines of an age-old question from this forum:  

I think I may have suggested this many years ago, but it's worth another go:What are the chances of seeing a character/paragraph style palette in AE? I'm sure I'm not alone in finding the method of copying/pasting a bit of text from a "desired" style into a new text layer, before deleting it and pasting/typing some unformatted text, so it matches the desired style. With the introduction, some time ago, of the ability to access text styles/fonts/etc via scripting/expressions, I'd have thought it wouldn't be too hard to implement an InDesign/Illustrator character style palette. Wouldn't that be nice? (I know I could probably do this using mogrt templates and things, but that's an awkward and time-consuming workaround).

I’d like to see AE have the ability to ignore missing frames in a sequence in the same way that Nuke can do it. Currently we have two options when importing e.g. animation that’s been rendered on twos for previewing. We can ignore missing frames and have the hideous missing footage screen show every other frame, making previewing impossible. Or we can import sequences on twos with “Force Alphabetical Order” enabled, which removes the first problem but then does not respect frame numbers. Neither is very user friendly. Nuke has an option to just ignore missing frames such that a sequence can be viewed with missing frames simply holding from the last available image in a sequence. 

I’ve been using a competing vector program for creating braille signage and wondered if there was any plans on having this be something Illustrator or Indesign could incorporate natively so that I can stop using the other program entirely?  The workflow currently with adobe products is:go to some conversion web page like brailletranslator.orgpaste text in for the conversion, copy resultsgo back into my Indesign doc using a braille font with a CA Standard paragraph style (that I’ve created) This works for making 1-10 signs, but I’d prefer to have this be something I was able to merge from a CSV file as we typically need to create 100 individual signs at a time--which the competing program will also not do. It does however have a TEXT TO BRAILLE and BRAILLE TO TEXT option from the TEXT menu and a panel that looks a little like this:   

After Effects should allow users to add multiple instances of the same Layer Style—such as multiple strokes, inner shadows, drop shadows, glows, and overlays—and freely drag them into any order.Photoshop already supports stacking several instances of certain Layer Styles, but After Effects limits each layer to one of each style and uses a fixed render order. Currently, achieving these looks requires duplicating layers or repeatedly precomposing, which makes projects cluttered and harder to edit.Please make Layer Styles stackable, reorderable, and saveable as presets while keeping the original text, shape, or layer fully editable.

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. 

Most DLCs and other compositing software support OCIO 2.5+ configs now and it would be nice for After Effects to support them as well in the Custom OCIO Configuration. A popular example: Using Blender 5+ OCIO configs in After Effects.

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. 

We want to hear your ideas about how we can improve After Effects. Your opinion is very important to us and the ideas provided here regularly appear in future versions. When posting an idea, here are a couple of things to keep in mind:   How will the idea help your workflow?  You're the expert on your workflow, so tell us how your idea would improve your workflow. What problem are you having today that the idea could solve? That helps us understand your idea better. It also makes it easier for us to follow up with you to get more info on your idea.    One idea per thread If you've got two (or more!) ideas, make each of them a separate thread. Doing this will allow others to vote on a single, specific idea and not confuse up-votes amongst a list of feature requests.   Enlist support! If you feel strongly about a feature, and you know other people do too, get them to vote on it.   

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.

This might be a long shot and I dont know if its technically possible to implement, but I think this would be a major improvement to after effects as a whole. I think the easiest way to explain it is looking at the dynamic link feature between premiere and AE, but from AE projects to AE projects.I would have plenty of usecases for this and I it would elevate professional workflows into new heights.Just like having your own library of functions in coding, that you can link in multiple scripts, updating or adding new logic to the source function which automatically integrates in the scripts where its linked to. In this case the function would be an After effects project that you can reuse and implement in other projects and automatically updates in all linked projects if theres changes to the master project.Reallife example: I have a beverage flatlabel that I wrap around a beverage can with UV Map. I use this Label in multiple projects, since theres plenty of different campaigns and

The user selects or imports a screenshot containing text. The panel analyzes the letterforms in the image. It searches for visually similar fonts. It displays the closest matches and allows the user to apply or activate the selected font in After Effects.Its Match font, but in after 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.