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Feature Focus: Quick Offset: stagger your layers just by dragging them

Forum|Forum|8 months ago
June 18, 2025
17 replies
13621 views

Edit: Aug 17, 2025 — Quick Offset is now released in the official release of After Effects 25.4

Great news for After Effects users! Starting with version 25.4. build 50 of After Effects Beta, we're excited to introduce Quick Offset - an efficiency feature that makes staggering your layers and keyframes in your timeline much easier.

What's New

Quick Offset makes it easy to move each layer in your selection — and keyframes across multiple layers — with just a simple keyboard-modified drag. Just select several layers — or keyframes on different layers — and hold down CMD+OPT on Mac / CTRL+ ALT on PC while you drag your selection in the timeline to watch as your layers (or keyframes) distribute themselves across the timeline under your mouse cursor. Creating cascading and overlapping animations was much more work than it needed to be, Quick Offset makes it much simpler now.

What it does:

Layer offsetting: Select multiple layers in the order you want to offset, hold CMD+OPT (Mac) or CTRL+ALT (PC), and drag left or right to move the last layer selected. All the other selected layers in between will distribute themselves in between in the order that you selected them — that's it!

Get Creative with Selection Order: Selecting layers in a random order can quickly add interest and variation to your timeline!

Works with keyframes too: Offset keyframe timing while keeping your animations intact. Groups of keyframes on each layer will stick together as you stagger them across the timeline.

Visual feedback: See exactly how much you're offsetting as you drag.

Any selection order: Pick layers in whatever order works for your animation.
Precise timing: Fine-tune beyond whole frames for smoother results.

We Want Your Feedback

Quick Offset is all about making your daily work a little easier. We'd love to hear how it's working for you:

Is it saving you time on staggered animations?

What situations are you finding it most useful for?

Any ideas for making it even easier to use?

Are you satisfied with the way the layers are timed in the composition after using Quick Offset?

Drop your thoughts in the comments — your feedback helps us make After Effects better!

Known Issues and Feature Limitations

Only linear offsets are currently supported, each layer will be offset in time by the same amount.

If you marquee a selection of keyframes, the offset order will not consider the direction you selected them; it will just use the layer order in the composition.

To make extremely smooth animations, staggered layers and keyframes will start on subframes.

Try Quick Offset with these other features currently in Beta

Alt/Opt+Drag to Duplicate Layers

Set keyframes on a layer, Alt+Drag on PC / Opt+Drag on Mac to create duplicates all over your comp, then use Quick Offset to stagger them to quickly create a cascade of animations.

Quick Set Anchor to snap anchor points

Select one or more layers, and click the Anchor Point icon in the Properties Panel to reveal a Quick Set Anchor dialog to snap the anchor point to the corner or center point of your layers, or use the shortcut Shift+Tab to bring up the dialog right under your mouse!

We can't wait to hear what you think of Quick Offset!

Show previous replies

Manaus

Inspiring

Awesome update! I love seeing these kinds of Quality of Life improvements, and this one is definitely a time saver!

Keep them coming!

Valentin Robert

Participating Frequently

That's great.
What would be nice is that this could have ease and random features... But maybe that's why scripts are all about?

J

Jarle Leirpoll

Legend

This is fantastic! Huge time saver. I'll probably be using it more with keyframes than with whole layers.

Linear only is a bit of a limitation, though. What if we could drag vertically to introduce more "easing" to the staggering? We'd need a "dead zone" so we don't do it by accident, of course.

sskaz

Inspiring

Dragging vertically to ease the stagger is an amazing idea. And bonus points for the dead zone.

D

Digiking

Participating Frequently

Hey could you add noise support with strength and seed numbers for layers for even random order and variations?

Noise control should be a standard in every application by now!

Roland Kahlenberg

Legend

EeeeeK!

Where do I go to get a refund. 😉

Very Advanced After Effects Training | Adaptive & Responsive Toolkits | Intelligent Design Assets (IDAs) | MoGraph Design System DEV

C

CannonMcClain

Participating Frequently

Love the quick offset feature so far. One quick note about snapping: it seems that you can only snap to the first or last layers and first or last keyframes when holding shift. It would be nice to be able to snap the middle layers and keyframes to the playhead too.

For the quick anchor point offset: is it possible to keep the layer in place and move all position keyframes to match the new anchor point position rather than creating a new position keyframe? As is, this is only helpful when there are no position keyframes yet, but if you already have a ton of position keyframes added, it's unhelpful

S

Scott.C.

Inspiring

This is an awesome improvement. Hopefully I can finally ditch Rift after all these years. I think looking at some of the things that rift does would be a good start. Or maybe bring some of this functionality into the graph editor so you can set the easing of the offset or something. Not sure how to keep it all in the timeline without create a panel, but I think having the graph editor involved makes sense.