Feature Requests

Hi:   Up until the latest update (2025) for After Effects. I was able to change my Theme UI Color. This link shows a video of how you used to able to change the Theme UI Color: (Mod note: Link removed)   I contacted an Adobe Agent and he said several changes were included in this latest update of After Effects. He said to file a feature request here in hopes of getting that feature back again. The After Effects Version I am using is: 25.0.0 (Build 53) and I am running it on a PC with a Windows 11.  This may not seem like a big issue to some people but it's something I got used to as part of my workflow.  If you could bring this feature back it would greatly be appreciated!   Mod note: Please do not condone the use of internal engineering tools like Console. The link showing how to change engineering settings in the UI has been removed. The text was also modified. Thanks.

It is very inconvenient to call up hidden tools by holding the mouse. Calling the panel menu is perfectly implemented in Photoshop, also perfectly in Illustrator - right-click on the top and immediately see the list of available tools. Why can't it be the same in AE, Premiere? This holding is a very inconvenient action. And also when you start learning other programs, and again have to get used to a different way of calling this menu.Let's vote in a friendly way and ask to add the ability to call this menu as it is in most normal programs, through the right mouse click. I hope this will get where it needs to go. Thank you.

When I merge two clips, one a wav and the other a video with bad audio track, the new merged clip always has two separate audio tracks instead of one. Can we get this as an option please?

Hi! I have a request to create sticky layers, so I can for instance stick Solid and Adjustment layer to the main video and it will resize together!You might say - just precompose them, but I like to keep them under control and not having 20 comps in one.PLease support me on this, because I am always bumping into microframes sticking out here and there.

When I click Time Stretch in AE I put in 50% to speed upt the clip to X2.In Premiere Duration I have to put in 200% to do the same thing.Could you please make it the same for both apps, because it is distracting and confusingThanks

The After Effects user interface is very diffuclt to work with at 4k, even on very large monitors. To wit, on a 32" monitor at 3840x2160, the text of a layer name is 1/16 of an inch tall– 8 layers are packed into each vertical inch. The Console Debug "AdobeCleanFontSize" workaround has no effect on some aspects of the interface, such as layer names, text in effect control panes, etc. This undersized UI poses legibility challenges, and slows workflow by requiring an extrordinary level of pointing accuracy to click on things. Illustrator solves this problem elegantly by adding a "UI scaling" slider control to the "User Interface" pref pane. Photoshop solves this problem a bit less elegantly but still effectively with a "UI Font Size" and a "Scale UI to Font" option.  I suggest the AE team adopts one of these appoaches.  I'd also suggets that this be a very high priority. It is necessary for most AE artists to work at 4k these days, making this an annoyance that I deal with

Often while writing an expression, I'll need to refer to a property that isn't currently visible. In this case, I have to leave the expression editor to twirl down properties, and then have to open the expression editor again and find where I left off (and potentially have to resize the editor again).   It would be helpful, while the expression editor is active, to be able to hold down a key (eg. Alt), allowing the user to interact with other parts of the UI without closing the editor.

Currently, if you’re pickwhipping and you need to access a property that’s hidden, then you need to stop pickwhipping, open up the property, and then pickwhip again.It would be helpful to be able to hold a designated key to temporarily suppress the pickwhip, allowing you to interact with the UI (eg. twirl open properties, unshy layers, or open another comp), before continuing to connect the active pickwhip.The above is an example for the expression pickwhip (where this would be most useful), but this would also be applicable to layer pickwhips and matte pickwhips (eg. if you need to unshy layers).

We need the ability to resolve missing fonts by selecting an alternative installed font from the computer, not just an Adobe font. Ideally it would also be possible to replace specific fonts in a project, even if they aren't missing. The same way most other Adobe apps handle it.

Many people have trouble with eye strain especially animators. Why in the world was this functionality removed from After Effects? Please add this feature. 

We mock up tweets, Instagram and Facebook posts daily for our newsroom and color emoji fonts simply don't work in AE. We have to go find each individual emoji as a PNG, import it manually and sync it up with our text animation.Having emoji support would be a big deal for us. And I'd argue it's necessary in today's social media obsessed world!

Hi everyone, I need a new expression to find a specific word in a sentence and apply another style to it. best regardFabrice

Alignment is so essential in After Effects such as Align Left, Right, Center, Bottom, etc but till this now they don’t have shortcuts ! Assigning custom keyboard shortcuts to these functions is crucial for speeding up our workflow like adobe illustartor  Any idea if this will be implemented sooner?

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!  

Stop adding new features until you fix the bugs and make AE work reliably 

There doesn't seem to be any way to make audio editable in a mogrt, would be great to be able to do things like link audio levels to a checkbox to make it possible to enable/disable through the Essential Properties etc.   Currently manipulating audio with Essential Properties appears to be impossible

Property panel is great when dealing with complicated and nested shape layers.But adding fills, strokes, rectangles, or modifiers like merge paths, offset paths needs you to go in the timeline.It will be really easier if there was an ‘add’ bottom in the Properties panel, then what you choose to be added is added to the selected properties!My Request:Adding ‘Add’ button to the Properties panel for adding special shape groups like the one beside the ‘Content’ property group.How it will help my workflow:It is very helpful when dealing with complex shape layer and stylize them!Upvote if you like the Idea!Property panel 

Often rendering social media files with safe area guide layer that would be nice to not see when playback

Currently, the only way to prevent accidental spatial movement of a layer is to use the global "Layer Lock." However, this prevents all other interactions (trimming, adding effects, color grading, or adjusting masks).In workflows like conforming, color grading, or technical compositing, we often need to ensure a layer remains at its exact coordinates without freezing the entire layer. A simple accidental press of an arrow key or a "click-and-drag" in the Composition window can create sub-pixel shifts or black edges that are hard to spot until the final QC.Proposed Solution Individual Property Locking: Add a "lock" icon next to the Transform group in the Timeline. Clicking it would disable any spatial changes (Position, Scale, Rotation, Anchor Point) while keeping the layer selectable and editable for effects. Visual Indicator: A small lock icon visible next to the "Transform" text when the layer is unrolled. Preferences: Add a setting in Preferences > General to "Auto-lock Trans

please go back to the old UI when it comes to opening saved projects. When I click the project on my coputer it should just to open. Skip the homepage, just open the project. Premiere does this, why does AE have this extra unnecessary step? 

More than ever, motion design projects need to work across different aspect ratios, typically 1920×1080px (standard for 16:9 videos) and 1080×1920px (for Instagram and TikTok videos). Adding a simple composition orientation button — similar to the one already available in Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign — would greatly improve the composition creation workflow.

It would be great to be able to collect a project from the Commandline. It would be great to collect data from a project to a json file without having to pop open the UI for the app. It would be great to be able to swap media without having to save out and string parse an .aepx file.How would one automate this?aerender already works headlessly, but is not useful for anything other than rendering.That’s my human request. I’ll attach my AI one here for the bots:  ---  Summary  After Effects lacks a documented, reliable command-line interface for headless script execution. This is a significant barrier to integrating After Effects into professional VFX pipelines, where every other  major DCC application provides this capability as a first-class feature.  ---  The Problem  In a VFX production pipeline, artists work across multiple applications — Nuke, Maya, and Houdini — that are managed by pipeline tools responsible for:  - Opening projects and collecting metadata (shot info, asset refere

I would like a feature that allows me to import zip file sequentially numbered files into After Effects without unzipping them.

Hello!I would like to work with OpenType in After Effects.I have to import the character I want from Illustrator (and then create a shape for that character), and I don´t want that. I want to be able to work natively in AE. Could you make that?Thanks

While its not a solution for everyone, Figma’s autolayout is incredibly helpful for grouping blocks of elements together with some level of relationship to each other (gaps, margins). The ability to create this type of dynamic frame and then add a fill to it would be huge. I’ve recently had to mimic an autolayout frame for an icon and two stacked lines of text. It works, but its a lot of layers just to make the relationship work, keep the elements centered, then add dummy layers so that I could 1) make a set height for a button and then 2) use SourceRect at time to make the width dynamic. Super fantastic but also highly impractical. 8 layers in total needed for 3 elements and a fill. So I’m hoping that a FR for something more native (even without all the bells and whistles found in Figma or PenPot or UX tool of your choice) would be incredibly useful.