Feature Requests

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!

I work with dozens of 2d animators (myself included) who would love to make After Effects shape and puppet pin animations a bigger part of our workflow, but we're limited by the current selection tool.  When animating a complex shape (or a mesh of puppet pins), it can get quite tedious using the rectangle selection to manually select each group of vertices and pins we want to transform.  (I've attached a gif showing how Lasso can be easily twice as fast). Having a Lasso tool (like the one in Photoshop, Illustrator, and Animate) would save us countless hours, help After Effects integrate even more seamlessly with Photoshop & Illustrator, and free us up to create much more complex and beautiful shape, puppet pin, and character animations. Other users have also noted that a lasso selection tool for keyframes in the timeline would also be extremely helpful in their workflows.   Thanks for reading, and please upvote if you agree! 🙂 (Kudos

For some chroma key jobs where Keylight fails, the good old Color Range keyer gets better results. But unfortunately, it is stuck in the 8bit era.Please update it to work with 16bit.

Along with migrating preferences, it would be a HUGE time-saver for there to be a tool/process to migrate plug-ins, extensions, and non-native fx when moving to a new version of AE. While some can be copied over, not all, and not having to manually re-install things would make life easier.

We can access marker times , keyframes times etc. But we cannot access then work area start and finish times via expressions.this will be helpful for creating loops and much more i suspect. somethingLike = thisComp.workAreaStart; andThis = thisComp.workAreaEnd;It can return time values just like inPoint and outPoint does for a layer.thanks

Simulation effects: Who does not love them?Particle Playground being a native plugin of AE (non Cycore) is very powerful, full of potencial and i love to experiment with it. The issue is that is slow.. incredible slow. And althought there are much better but payed 3rd party plugins it would be nice for AE to have its own 2025-26 GPU accelerated 2d/3d updated particle system internally to properly balance its market competition on this.Does this idea connect with anyone else? 

I see AE users constantly scrolling and clicking on opened comp tabs on the composition panel to find the one they need to work on. Although this is partially a matter of user workflow tidyness, organization and naming, After Effects could improve in its own way.For example having a preferences option, limiting the number of maximum recent comp-tabs you can have opened in the timeline panel. This in AE would prevent an user needing to scroll to X amount of open comps in the timeline, looking for the correct one, and having only a chosen max, of the recent ones.Nuke has this feature to avoid a crazy amount of uncessary node panels confusing the user while working and making the workflow and navigation much more efficient.

Dear Adobe Team,First, I want to thank you for the incredible work you’ve done with After Effects and Premiere Pro. I’ve personally used Premiere for over 10 years on major television projects and commercials that have aired on networks like NBC, ABC, and others. Adobe has been at the center of my workflow for more than a decade, and I deeply respect how robust and reliable your tools have been.That said, as workflows continue to evolve, speed and efficiency are becoming just as important as capability. Right now, so many creators are turning to other technologies because they don’t want to spend countless hours keyframing, masking, rotoscoping, and handling repetitive tasks that AI can help accelerate. While After Effects is unmatched in depth and precision, it risks falling behind if AI-powered features aren’t implemented quickly.The reality is simple: if Adobe doesn’t move faster in this area, another company will. Creators need smart, intuitive AI tools built directly into After Ef

An example: The motion blur switch was set so that it would turn blue, which was immediately visible when turned on. Currently, either there is an ashen grey background on or off. If the aim is to help the users, then a stark contrast like the blue button vs the current grey background makes a lot more sense

Make it so that after I search for an item in the After Effects project panel the original folder structure honors the twirl-down state before the search was invoked after I clear the search to restore visibility of the other assets. Stop completely twirling up all the folders I had twirled open before the search. Thank you

Hi everyone,I’m currently working on a very wide composition (11520x1152 px) with a camera and lots of 3D layers. In older versions of After Effects, it was possible to arrange the 2 Views either side by side (Horizontal) or stacked (Vertical).This option was removed years ago (for whatever reason?). When I use two comp views side by side, everything becomes extremely small at this resolution, which makes working with 3D layers and camera perspectives unnecessarily complicated.With a Vertical view (stacked), I could make much better use of my screen space and work far more efficiently. So my request is:
Could you please bring back the option to switch between 2 Views Horizontal and 2 Views Vertical in After Effects? For everyone working with extremely wide formats, this would be a huge improvement.Thanks a lot!

Hi,In AE 2025 every time I add a comp to the Render Queue it goes back to the default “Best Settings” + “Lossless.”In older versions AE remembered my last render settings and output module, which was much faster.Would be great if AE could keep the last used settings again — it saves a lot of time.Thanks!

One of the bigger frustrations I have with AE comes up when I open a project created by someone else, and the AE UI converts to THAT person's layout. I can think of 0 instances in which that would be of any use. I know I can go to Window->Workspace and call my saved layout back up, but why should I have to? Please change this behavior.

Previously requested but wanted to add a few addendums to this really desired item:Love the increasing native 3D capabilities of After Effects and I really wish the workflow of nesting compositions to build complex animations was reflected in the new Advanced 3D renderer. I would love to be able to select or reference a composition from the project panel to be used as a 3D layer's texture.As an animator / designer for screens for live events, we often use After Effects not only to build out large pieces of content (multiple synchronous 4K+ feeds) but also to previsualize in real-time what our content will look like. This is super helpful because we don't have to round-trip still frames or large renders between AE and another DCC. However, creating these previsualization setups can take a large amount of time, much of which having compositions UV-mapped onto 3D objects would save an immense amount of time. For instance, for a curved screen we often are cutting up a composition into mult

For some kinds of Projects, I rely on a set o f scripts to speed up things.I would like to see a Scripts panel to have these scripts handy.And on top of that, it would be nice to assign a key shortcut to each of the scripts.

Hello, Can you add the Solid Settings to the Properties panel? Thank you.

whenever i track motion i click the analyze 1 frame forward to get a better track when the auto track doesnt work and it works pretty well (combined with me adjusting the track to the point where it should be) but a lot of time is wasted inbetween clicking that then dragging my mouse to adjust the track then back to go another frame, i thought there could be shortcut to just analyze 1 frame so i didnt need to my mouse saving a significant amount of time but alas there wasn't.i know there are shortcuts to move the track however many pixels but i think its far more efficent to have 1 shortcut to go 1 frame then adjust rather than having to memorize 10 that adjust the track (those shortcuts in my opinion could be better spent elsewhere)not sure if this is a difficult shortcut to create but it would certainly save so many countless hours for me and editors alike -thank you for time

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

Hiya, just a couple of quick quality of life ideas that could make working with the AE render queue a bit easier:Add a button to collapse all completed renders - this would make seeing what's going on with multiple exports much easier, and save some clicking around time.A modifier version of that button (e.g. Shift-click) to remove completed renders from the queue - again, quick timesaving QoL idea.Add the ability to invert the queue order, so that newly-added items are at the top of the list instead of the bottom. (Or maybe the ability to sort by column title - the Status column would be really useful for this)Add Overscroll to the RQ panel, so that if the most recently-added items are at the bottom it's possible to scroll past them to reveal some space to expand menus into (this is an extension of this request: https://community.adobe.com/t5/after-effects-ideas/allow-overscroll-in-the-timeline-panel/idi-p/13229510 that I made on an old account) I reckon any or all of these

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??

When working with large files in After Effects, I'll often disable a layer once it's effects are applied and animated so I can focus on working on the other layers without having to worry about viewport preview times. When it comes time to render the final animation, I'll often forget to turn these layers back on, resulting in me having to render a file a second time.I'd love to be able to designate a layer to be a "Target Layer" in the way that you can designate a Guide Layer.Where a Guide Layer shows up in your viewport, but not in the final render, a Target Layer shows up in the final render, but not in the viewport.This is a feature that already exists in many 3D softwares. It would be nice to be able to do the same in After Effects.This will be a substantially quicker/cheaper alternative to having to work with proxies.

When two consecutive keyframes on the same property have the same value, the Timeline should visually indicate that they form a “hold” or plateau. For example:Draw a small horizontal connector line between them.Or tint/mark the in-between area so it’s obvious at a glance that no change happens between those keys.Why it matters:Currently, in the Timeline, even if two keyframes have the same value, there’s no visual difference compared to changing-value keys — you only see it by scrubbing or checking the value numerically. This slows down workflow when checking for “freezes” in animation, especially across many layers.Other software (like Blender or Cavalry) makes it clear visually when keys hold the same value, which helps animators quickly spot:Loops or cyclesFreeze framesPlateaus where nothing changesDetails / Proposal:Visual connectionA small flat horizontal line between identical-value keys in the Timeline view.Or a faint shading/connector overlay.Per-propertyWorks individually for

After Effects currently offers robust face tracking with detailed "Face Measurements" data, including face position, orientation, and specific metrics for eyes and mouth. This data is invaluable for driving mask animations and other effects, as highlighted in the discussion "Using Face Measurements Data to Drive Mask Animation" on the Adobe Community Forum. To further enhance these capabilities and provide even more creative control, I propose adding nose tracking data to the existing Face Measurements. Including nose-specific data, such as its position, width, and height, would significantly expand the possibilities for facial animation within After Effects. This addition would enable more precise and realistic deformations, allow for targeted mask animations around the nose area, and facilitate more nuanced character expressions. For example, animators could easily manipulate masks to simulate nose movements or attach visual effects that accurately follow the nose's dynamics.&nb

I'm proposing an idea for an After Effects improvement: a more direct way to use the existing Face Measurements data points to drive mask animations. Imagine creating "Annoying Orange"-like videos more easily! After Effects already excels at face tracking and provides incredibly detailed "Face Measurements" data, all relative to a designated "Rest Pose" frame. This includes crucial information like:Face Position: Offset values along the x, y, and z axes.Face Orientation: Three-dimensional orientation along the x, y, and z axes.Left/Right Eye Measurements: Eyebrow Distance, Eyelid Openness, and Eye Gaze (X, Y).Mouth Measurements: Offset (X, Y) and Scale (Width, Height).Currently, after extensive searching, there isn't an explicit or straightforward method to directly import or paste this "Face Track Points" keyframe data (especially for specific features like the mouth) onto a mask. While general track data can be copied and pasted as text, and methods like "Points Follow Nulls" ex

It's really either difficult or impossible to visually detect when a property has two keyframes that are a frame (or less than a frame) apart - and depending on the length of the timeline and its zoom level, even having 5 frames separation between keyframes is not humanly possible. Yet, this occurs more often than desired. And with the new Quick Offset feature this issue will hit more users as keyframes will occasionally lock themselves in-between frames. So, I'm looking at larger keyframe icons to depict such occurrences. It'll be great if the size can be responsive to timeline length+zoom levels. And add a threshold (in frames) for this to kick in with a default of 10 frames.