Feature Requests

Dear Adobe After Effects Team,First, I would like to thank you for the incredible progress made in the native 3D workflow inside After Effects. The addition of GLB, glTF, FBX, and OBJ support has opened many new possibilities for motion designers and artists who rely on After Effects as their primary creative environment.I would like to submit a feature request that I believe would have a significant impact on the future of After Effects: native support for Alembic (.ABC) files.Alembic has become an industry-standard format for exchanging complex animated geometry between 3D applications. It is widely used for: Ocean and water simulations Cloth simulations Hair and fur animation Destruction and VFX caches Geometry Nodes workflows Vertex and point-level animation High-end character deformation caches Currently, many artists can import static or skeletal animated models into After Effects, but simulations and vertex-based animations are often lost because they rely on geometr

Please add a dedicated animation Dope Sheet to Adobe After Effects. This would not replace the existing Timeline or Graph Editor (though it could be combined with the graph editor). Instead, it would provide a higher-level animation timing view designed specifically for blocking, retiming, spacing decisions, pose timing, and coordinating animation across many layers and properties. A true dope sheet would make After Effects significantly more efficient for character animation, motion design, explainer animation, rigged 2D animation, UI animation, kinetic typography, and hybrid 2D/3D production.The Current ProblemThe current After Effects Timeline is very powerful, but it becomes difficult to manage when a composition contains many animated layers, rigged character controls, shape layers, text animators, effects, masks, and nested precomps. Animators often need to understand the timing structure of an animation before they need to fine-tune curves. In those moments, the Graph Editor is

Simple: I want to be able to adjust the kerning alt + arrow nude kerning level. Currently defaults to +/-20 with no way to change and extendscript is not cursor aware so no way to do it with a script either. Always have to access it via properties / char panel which is not ideal.  Why:Figma type engine is a bit different than adobe so microkerning is something I do a lot of right now.  

IDEA:The request is an extension of the current solo and Shy functions - currently we can solo layers in the viewport and make them Shy in the timeline as separate actions. I’d love to see an option to ‘Super-solo’ layers, which would allow the user to show only the layers they’ve got selected in both the timeline and the viewport in a single action.This would be super-useful when working on heavy / busy comps - being able to quickly reduce down to just the layers I need to see at that time would reduce cognitive load by a lot. It would also potentially help with performance, by reducing the amount of layers etc. that need to be drawn onscreen.PROPOSED USAGE:The User selects one or more layers, then runs the 'Super-solo' command. The result is only the selected layers are visible in the viewport and the timeline. All other layers are hidden in the viewport and the timeline.Some kind of indicator would be needed to show the user that Super-solo was active, in case a project was saved wi

It would be fantastic if Adobe could open up the color space setting to be modifiable via the C++ SDK. Obviously these are quite new features, but they are not currently exposed to the SDK. I’m working on a plugin to take out the hard part of handling colorspace for artists so they can worry about the work and not the science.NamelyProject - color ENGINEProject - OCIO configProject - working spaceProject - display spaceFootage items in project panel - colourspaceThank you 🙏🏼

I'd love to be able to paste raster graphics directly into AE.  It should just make a new footage element and save it to disk. There are so many cases where you need to bring in a ref image, a screenshot, something from an email, a style guide, etc.  Having to launch photoshop, create a new file, paste it in, go through the PITA photoshop save dialogs, say you want to save it locally and not on adobe cloud, navigate to the file, import it, then add it to your comp is a lot of steps/insanity that should be automated.

When adding properties to essential graphics, can it auto switch to the comp you are adding it from,  I cant think of any reason to not do that? you cant even add them to the wrong comp panel.  

You may have noticed that Figma released Figma Motion and is gunning for animation software. Can we get Figma’s Auto-Layout in After Effects? How will the idea help your workflow? It is hard to imagine what design would not benefit from an auto-layout system. Anything with text, shapes, and images smaller than the full video frame would benefit. The simple example of “text in a box” is the most basic, but this same idea is required for animating UX/UI animation, product videos, and templates.Current workflows to mimic responsive design are to use complex expressions, 3rd party scripts, or manually create many variations.Expressions are a bad workflow for layout because they require a coding skills which most motion designers don’t have; and for those with the skills, it is still tedious to set up and “rig”. Once rigged, AE’s limited performance is further bogged down by running those heavy expressions on every single frame.Scripts and plugins are a bad workflow for layout because they

I need to apply grain frequently in my work to clean plates I’ve created, and it needs to match the 6k/4k HDR plates I’ve been provided. I prefer Add Grain to Match Grain, as it’s quicker and more accurate for me to manually set it. Because of the size of the plates, and the lack of GPU acceleration in this plug-in, it’s the main bottleneck in my rendering speed, plus 32-bit would help with color fidelity. Obviously, multiframe rendering would be great, too, but I would at least love GPU acceleration to start!

I have found the solution, after upgrade caption to graph, select all the graph captions  Select all the graph of captionNow in the properties click on the wrench icon of the text, PropertiesChange Text layer type to Point Text Select TextSelect Ok. Now copy layers and paste it to AE.  Now you can easily add effects and un-precompose or any thing you like. 

Hey! When using the Pickwhip to reference things while writing expressions I frequently forget to twirl open the property I intend to select. This usually means that I have to exit writing the expression where I am, twirl open the property in the timeline to make it visible, then resume the expression writing / pickwhip and carry on.It would be a good quality of life improvement if while dragging the pickwhip, hovering over a twirled-up item would unfold it. The closest analogue would be dragging a file into the Project Panel - if I hover over a closed Project Panel folder for a second or so it will twirl open.I’d initially suggest that this would only be useful to have on the Expression Pickwhip - there seems to be limited functional use for adding it to the Matte or Parent Pickwhips.Perhaps a longer timeout when hovering over a layer itself compared to hovering over a layer property might be useful - that way users would be less likely to trigger un-twirling when simply selecting top

After Effects currently shows where keyframes exist, but it does not clearly show where a property is actually changing over time.I would love an optional timeline display mode that visually indicates the spans between keyframes where a property’s value is actively animated.For example, if a Position property has four keyframes:Keyframe 1 to Keyframe 2: Position changes → show a colored bar or highlighted span. Keyframe 2 to Keyframe 3: Both keyframes have the same value → no bar. Keyframe 3 to Keyframe 4: Position changes again → show a bar.This would make it much easier to open a complex comp and quickly understand where animation is actually happening, versus where keyframes simply preserve a pose or were copied forward.A few useful details:The indicator could appear directly beneath or behind the property’s keyframes. Hold keyframes could use a different pattern or color than interpolated animation. It would be especially helpful if collapsed layers could show an aggregated indicat

Please add mogrt batch export functionality to After Effects.I will try to describe the current exporting process the best I can.Click the "Export Motion Graphics Template..." button -> Being asked to Save the project -> Wait for After Effects to Save and apparently iterate through every comp for some reason -> Wait for project to open -> Write mogrt tags -> Wait for mogrt to saveDepending on the project, this process might take several minutes. Did you seriously expect your users that might need to export dozens of templates to do this manually? It literally means wasting hours just exporting files in one of the most tedious processes I've ever experienced. Has this not been considered or is it just too difficult to implement?

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

The Problem: Currently, when After Effects attempts to read a media file that is marked as "online-only" via Dropbox's legacy sync mode, it errors out. Instead of triggering a download, AE reads the raw 0-byte placeholder file, fails, and throws a "Media Offline" or bad header error.To make matters worse, AE then permanently caches this 0-byte state in the Common Media Cache. Even if we go into Finder, right-click the file, and select "Make Available Offline," AE will still refuse to read the newly downloaded physical file until we manually navigate to ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Common/Media Cache Files and trash the cache. I build a custom bash command to handle this situation which mitigates a bit but still hard to explain to the whole team every time this happens or to freelancers.  Why "Just update to macOS FileProvider" isn't an option: The standard response from Adobe support is usually to ensure we are using the modern macOS File Provider API for cloud sync. However, Dr

Description:Currently, this is only panel that doesn’t automatically update when you switch to a different active composition. If it’s going to lock to a different target comp, there should be a lock icon like Effect Controls and Comp/Layer/Footage viewer panels. Additionally, if the lock icon was added, then it should match the logic when new unlocked panels automatically open when you already have a panel of that type locked.(e.g. Lock your Effect Controls panel, switch to a different comp, and double-click on an effect’s name in the timeline. A new unlocked Effect Controls panel opens next to the previous panel.) This additional panel would then give the user the ability to work with multiple EG panels at once. This could be very handy when designing multiple EG settings/mogrts that should look identical/similarily. Why:Often times, I try to add properties to the wrong EG comp, just to be greeted with an error. (It could be said that instead of an error, it should aut

When copying keyframes from a layer’s Scale property and pasting them to a shape’s Scale property, AE returns an error:After Effects (Beta) error: The paste cannot be completed. Please check the copy and paste is between similar types of properties.Details: The clipboard contains data with a different number of dimensions (3) than the paste target requires (2). ( 26 :: 269 )While correct, it’s not intuitive. It would be helpful if, when copy-pasting from a 3-dimensional property to a related 2-dimensional property, the third dimension is ignored. Conversely, if copy-pasting from a 2- dimensional property to a related 3-dimensional property, paste in the first and second dimensions, and retain the existing third dimension already set on the property.

I just finished a session with one of Adobe’s help desk officers, trying to find a way to import SVGs from Affinity Studio into After Effects in a way that would generate a composition of individual shape layers for each vector layer. Unfortunately all I get is one shape layer with a bunch of groups nested inside. Apparently this is due to the way in which Affinity exports SVGs, where layers are somehow turned into groups. That’s a bummer and of course rather Affinity’s problem than AE’s, but if there was a way in which the SVG import could be improved with an option to turn SVG groups into layers too, that would help my workflow a lot :-)

I'm sure this has been asked for before, but I know I'm not alone in wanting character and/or paragraph styels in AE, which would behave exactly lkike those in InDesign/Illustrator (except with a few animatable parameters maybe!). I've just watched @JohnColombo17100380 and friends on YouTube, and will (for now) be implementing an adaptation of their expression. But it's a lot of faff compared to adding a style in Ai/Id etc! Could we please have character styles / paragraph styles in AE?

When you do Layer > New > Null Object it comes into your comp as Transparent. But when you open a new comp and want to use the same null dragging it in from the SOLIDS folder, it’s now opaque. I can’t imagine anyone using a 100x100 Null Object as an actual solid. Can you make it so that all Null objects always stay transparent (even in the solids folder) as if you created a new one? 🙏

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

I can't believe this is not in AE already, but can we have a keyboard shortcut that will allow us to place a clip onto a new layer in the timeline at the playhead so we don't have to keep dragging them in manually. I know that I can hold command (control in Windows)  and drag to the timeline, but that is still much slower than simply using a key command. Please and Thank You!

As a 3D person importing image sequences pretty regularly, it would be excellent to just be able to select all of the footage I've imported and interpret the footage all at once. Currently, you have to:Select a single item Interpret the footage properties Select that item again COPY the interpretation Select everything else Paste that interpretationThis could just be a single step with a single dialogue. 

I want to be able to create Arrays, whether that’s shape arrays, text arrays, image arrays, any kind of Array.  With companies asking for more and more output.  After effects needs to start moving towards procedural creation.  Arrays are the first step.  

It would be great to have an autosave option that works regardless of whether we've manually saved the project or not. I have autosave configured to run every 20 minutes, but I tend to save my project manually very frequently (every 5–10 minutes), so no autosave copies are generated.Sometimes I find that I need to recover something I deleted an hour ago, but I don't have any autosaved version available.