Feature Requests

When I select a layer in the timeline panel, said layer shows up in Effects Controls with All its effects open. ie: If I copy 4 effects (all closed) from one layer, then paste them to a different layer, they are all open on the new placement and I must close them to continue working in an organized fashion, (I train people and think it is best to only have open what you are working on, not everything at once) So, the first thing I do now in version 23.5 is take the time to close them all except the one I am working on. In the past, they defaulted to closed (I believe). I would prefer this, default to closed, then I'll open the one I am working on and save a nano-second. If I save enough nano-seconds over the course of the day, perhaps I'll be able to get more sleep and work better. Thank you.

Please make AE and AI and XD compatible when it comes to importing shapes with gradients. It would save so much time. I have to convert the ai file to a vector shape in ae and everything turns gray becuase it has gradients...a gradient circle stroke from ae turns into a thin gray fill. Importing from XD to AE completely disregards the gradient as a shape and presents an 1x image...These three programs are made by the same company, we need more compatibilty. pls

If it worked like Premiere, you could park the cursor over a layer and hold down option(Mac) and scroll the thumbwheel and that layer will enlarge taller or shrink to allow a better visual of the clip on the timeline. If you hold down shift + scroll the thumbwheel, ALL selected layers enlarge or shrink height.  Would certainly be a welcome addition while working on a 4K or larger monitor with higher resolution as those layers get pretty small to see what is on them.To win the Technical Achievement Award at the Oscars, if you found a way to make the text (clip name)on each layer scale up or down with the layer size, you would certainly get my vote.Thanks for this opportunity.Eric Williamson

Please add a proper history panel to After Effects! The History panel of the Edit menu is NOT user friendly at all. Couldn't tell which event came first. Can't undo going back in time if you go back to the wrong spot. Nearly destroyed hours of work!!!! Premiere has one! Photoshop has one!

I often have to search beyond the basic fonts for my projects, and more often than not, I find myself typing out my text in a composition and then bouncing through hundreds of fonts looking for one that works. During this process, I know basic information about the font I'm searching for (ie- it needs to be serif and condensed), but there's no way to filter through my installed fonts with this metadata to view only the fonts I need. The Adobe font library available in a browser gives me this ability, but it involves a second step and doesn't include the fonts I already have installed on my computer. If I could get a similar interface within after effects (and it could be something available in Premiere, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Indesign as well), it would dramatically speed up my workflow and result in higher-quality video, since I could more easily screen potential fonts.

Be able to select and move markers simultaneously

I would love the ability to view a video or comp when working with animation.Often I need a reference video, and with AE not making it possible to place stuff outside the main comp and see it the only real way is to add it to the comp - but then it blocks what i work on...Apps like AI and Animate makes you place stuff outside the workarea and lets you view it.A simple preview monitor that follows the timeline would also be a great. Thanks 🙂

Hi,  We do a fair bit of work with right-to-left languages in After Effects, and would love the ability to query if text is RTL through the scripting API.  Is this on the docket? If not, can you add it?If so, roughly when would it be slated for release? Thanks!Eric

Hey, I work a lot with collage style animation in after effects and tend to use a lot the feature "Detail-preserving upscale" and while its very useful its particulary complicated in the workflow to have it a separate effect, specially when working with null objects and expressions. I feel that this feature would be much usefull as a checkbox next to the default scale property. I mean, why would anyone prefer no to preserve detail while upscaling? but in the case you do want to loose detail for rendering time reasons, you can simply uncheck it and thats it. I dont know if my suggestion its the best way to improve the workflow of the tool and not sure if its an idea or a problem feedback but anyway I think that the feature as a separate effect is a problem with null objects. Thanks!

We need to render AE projects on different computers concurrently  by cli tool.Current issues: When we use  AE GUI, a cache will be generated, as shown in the green cache bar in the red box below. This cache can accelerate the rendering of AE.According to the directory of the Disk buffer, I find the cache storage location in the computer (see the figure below).  I shared the cache through file sharing(samba) and set Disk buffer path to the shared path on another computer . But the test results showed no acceleration effect.So I want to consult： Is there any way to use the cache of AE on another computer to accelerate rendering.

It would be super usefull to see the opacity in the timeline for each layer.«Kind of level of opacity» overtime just under the layer (or even over the layer color)Something like Premiere Pro or Audition.

It will be a miracle to see Firefly AI in After Effects

You need to have two vertex selected in order to open a path, otherwise the "closed" property just appears selected, dimmed and blocked. I would allow users to click on it, and warn them about the requirement of having two vertex selected. Otherwise you need to google it in order to get to this relevant info.

In some 3d software, they use highlight selections to let you know if you select a layer it has a relationship to another. The way that Bins alert to you to 3d stacks is a visual relationship example. Sometimes when cleaning up projects I'll go and remove layers that are turned off but not know if they are used with an effect (set matte) or track matte in a dense comp. I wish there was a way to know if a layer was being used or not, even if it was a pop up when deleting -- hey this layer is currently being used by set matte on layer 14 and 19. Thats all. 

Being able to select any layer in the stack as track layer was a long time dream feature.The problem I have now is that this new feature instead of being some additional feature to Track Mattes, completely replaced the old one - no bueno 😕😕1. There still needs to be a simple way of making the above layer a track matte like we used to.Right now we have to use the pickwhip, which is not fast or comfortable by any means, or pick the above layer from an all layers in comp dropdown. Well I'm on layer 67 of my comp and I want layer 66 to become the track matte - scrolling down through the layer list down to layer 66 is again not fast and not comfortable.I don't know make right clicking the layer dropdown automatically select the above layer as track matte, give us a keyborad shortcut that when pressed will make the above layer a track matte, at the very least make the current layer more visible in the dropdown list so it's easier to scroll down and find it - maybe bold font??

Hi I absolutely love the new track matte system!!!Kudo's to the devs its a really really nice change. However one thing was lost in the new system, previously when you copied a layer and the layer it was trackmatted to the trackmatte updated to fit the new layer. Atm it isnt like this. I included a video with an example. (Its kind of hard to describe properly since my second language is english) What would be ideal is that AE checks if the track matted layer is also being copied and makes the new copy automaticly update to the new one instead of the old one. If this description is kind of confusing please watch the video it makes it a bit more clear. Much love, Dierenwinkel

Request for Improvement of  the search in the Online User Guide: Is there a way to search only within the After Effects User guide? (Instead of the Community, Tutorials,Account info, Support, etc.?)  For example, I search "Pre-render" in the search bar. I do not get any relevant results. Even though "Pre-render" is a command within the software.  No links to the User Manual, just irrelevant articles.I'd rather search and quickly jump to the desciption of it in the User Manual only.  Is there no way to do that? Almost always I have to do a Google search. Better yet, do you still have an offline manual?  Years ago, when there were offline manuals, I think I could get the info I needed much quicker.It's a request for a feature that's been lost, I guess. Thank you.

Per the title: when I get the "not enough available space for the disc cache, please go to preferences" warning, I have the choice to turn off the warning overall or display it once per session. Since AE doesn't delete cached files, it's critical to empty the cache and it means going to preferences and manually clearing the cache. PLEASE consider adding an "empty cache now" button to the warning dialog. I've requested this in the past - it trips up new users and it adds a few steps for experienced users. It would be so simple and fast to just give us ONE BUTTON to do this when we're warned it's necessary. Not a critical bug fix, but it would be a nice streamlined feature that doesn't seem like you'd need to re-write a lot of code.

When working with lists of parameters in plugins like Element 3D, Particular etc. When we set keyframes for various effects, in the timeline we simply highlight a specific layer with our effect, hit the "u" key and every parameter with a keyframe is revealed. Why not give us the exact same feature in the effects control panel. Click the desired effect, hit "u" and that specific effect spins down all the parameters with a keyframe. This would clean up the confusion of a lot of these more complex plugins while allowing us to focus on just the parameters we are keyframing. Is this an After Effects feature or the individual 3rd party plugin? If you think this would be a welcome feature, please vote. Thanks!R.Cates

バージョン23.4からのプロジェクトパネル上でのソート順が変更されたことに伴って、数値の並び方以外も大きく変わってしまっています。特に 漢字/ひらがな/カタカナ/記号/数字/アルファベット が混在している場合、文字種ごとではなく、規則性もわからないほどバラバラに並んでしまいます。以前のような規則性が失われてしまっているのは仕様なのでしょうか？バグであれば改善をお願いしたいです。 ※AEのバージョンは23.5で日本語版を使用しています。

It would be great that when I create a precomp, if I could designate a folder for them to be created in the project. Just like when you create a solid, it automatically goes into a precomp folder, it would be nice to have a general option to check that puts precomps in the "Precomp" folder. 

Se me ocurrió una idea para AE:Live Images,una función que puede mover cualquier imagen en 2D con las capas separadas de la misma en Photoshop. Usando una mejorada función de Puppet,los usuarios podrán mover una ilustración con más posibilidades que nunca.

Hi, I'd like to suggest adding an audio notification to the 'The selected output module will overwrite a file that already exists.' modal dialog box that pops up when rendering from render queue. There's been times when I've pressed render, locked my screen and walked away, while actually leaving AE sat on this dialog and not rendering. That's on me, but if there was an audio notification when this popped up it would be a nice quality of life impreovement that would help reduce these happenings. Like a car beeping if you've left your lights on. Cheers!

The properties panel is such a great addition to the software. I feel it could go a step further by displaying some editable comp information (comp dimensions, framerate, etc) if no layers are selected. This would bypass hitting command/ctrl + K to edit the comp or even just to check the dimensions of the comp. Thoughts?

The feather mask tool was introduced, like 10 years ago.And still I have yet to see a single artist using it.The reason is simple, and it had been brought up from the very beginning: the feather keyframes are the same as the mask shape keyframes - it's ridiculous.Every roto artist in every software does shapes first and feathering later - but this workflow is impossible with AE - if we do shapes first, then we have to redo the feather on every single frame with a mask shape keyframe on it.Can we pleaaase have a separate feather keyframe track?Most rotojobs require like 20-30 mask shape keyframes but only 2-3 fether keyframes - there is no reason why these two properties shouldn't have two separate animation tracks 😕😕