A desktop motion graphics editor you actually own.
Compositions, keyframes and a graph editor, with After Effects’ shortcuts. Renders on your GPU, saves to your disk, costs nothing.
This one works — press play, drag the playhead, click a layer.
Formats Premation reads and writes
Supported formats: SVG, Lottie, MP4 - H.264, WebM - VP9 + alpha, MOV - ProRes 4444, PNG sequence, GIF, Image sequences, WAV audio
A compositor, not a web animation toy
Six areas of the editor, each shown as it actually looks. Click through — every capture is the real app.
Flat layers in real 3D space
Give a flat layer depth, then light it and film it. This is After Effects' Classic 3D model: Z position and X/Y rotation, one- and two-node cameras with depth of field, lights that cast shadows, and bevelled extrusion for shapes and text.
Drag the curve, feel the motion
Animation lives or dies in the easing. Grab a handle — the two layers on the right replay through whatever curve you draw.
Starts gently, ends gently. The default for almost everything.
Same math as the editor’s graph editor — value and speed tangents on every pair of keyframes.
The timeline is the product
Clip bars you can trim, markers that travel with a layer, a cache bar showing what is really in RAM, and playback that never leaves your machine.
One timeline holds everything — shapes, text, images, video, audio, SVG, Lottie, nested comps. Blend, mask and matte them like in After Effects (36 of its 38 blend modes), then grade with 154 built-in effects.
An assistant that writes keyframes, not video
It calls the same 61 tools you have in the UI, so everything it makes is a normal layer you can drag, re-ease and undo. Bring your own API key; there are no credits.
“Stagger the five cards in from the left, 4 frames apart, easing out.”
One engine draws the preview and the export
There is no separate export renderer to disagree with the viewport. Nine formats come out of the same render graph you were just scrubbing.
The default for sharing. Needs ffmpeg.
Smaller than MP4, plays on the web.
Lossless hand-off. Large. Needs ffmpeg.
Palettised across the animation. No audio.
The archival option. Audio rides along.
Vector shapes and transform tracks.
Deterministic by construction
One frame loop feeds every format, and frame time is index / fps rather than wall-clock. Re-render after a crash and you resume identical work.
It refuses to write an empty file
Every path asserts on a real frame count. A zero-frame encode is an error, not a silently successful black video.
Peak memory is one frame
Frames go to a temp directory and ffmpeg encodes in a child process. A multi-gigabyte export never passes through the app's memory.
Preview the actual export
The export dialog renders real export frames with the same snapshot builder the encoder receives, and lets you scrub the whole range first.
Your After Effects hands already know this
Same tool keys, same reveal keys, same F9. Pick a shortcut below the keyboard and watch the key light up where your hands expect it.
Premation uses After Effects keyboard shortcuts: V for Selection; W for Rotation; Y for Pan behind; G for Pen; Q for Rectangle; Cmd plus T for Text; F9 for Easy ease; Shift plus G for Graph editor; U for Reveal animated; Cmd plus Shift plus C for Pre-compose; Cmd plus K for Comp settings; Cmd plus Shift plus P for Command palette.
The model is the same
Comps and pre-comps, parenting, adjustment layers, track mattes, text animators, Classic 3D. Not lookalikes — the same concepts, under the same names.
So is the muscle memory
V, W, Y, G, Q for the tools. U reveals what is animated, P/S/R/T/A open the transform rows, F9 eases. Every key is rebindable if yours differ.
And where AE still wins, we say so
No rotoscoping, and 154 effects against 400-plus once third parties are counted. If your work needs those, After Effects is the right answer and we will not pretend otherwise.
Learn it by building something
Two walkthroughs that go end to end, naming the actual panels and buttons rather than describing them in general. No prior motion-graphics experience assumed.
Free on your machine, priced only for the cloud
The editor is AGPL-3.0 and runs offline with no account. You pay only if you want projects synced and rendered on our hardware.
Self-hosted
The whole editor on your own machine, under the AGPL.
Download- Every tool: compositions, graph editor, 2.5D, rigging, particles
- 154 effects, 36 blend modes and 10 layer styles
- No account, no network. Projects are .motion bundles on disk
- Export to every format, offline, with no watermark
- AGPL-3.0 source: read it, build it, fork it
The assistant and the plugin platform are part of the hosted builds and are absent here — the local edition has no backend, no registry and no revocation list. Everything else runs anywhere the app does.
Cloud
Public BetaEverything in self-hosted, plus the cloud. Free while we're in beta.
Get the app- Cloud projects, autosave and version history
- End-to-end encrypted project sync across machines
- Hosted mp4 rendering. Your machine stays free
- The plugin platform and its registry, with update checks
- The AI assistant, on your own provider key
Free and open to everyone during the beta. Paid plans are coming soon at $12/month; your projects will always export back to the free build.
Before you download
It is used in earnest, but it is pre-1.0 - version 0.3.1. Expect rough edges, and expect the project file format to still move. Several thousand automated tests cover the app and its engine packages, alongside a pixel-comparison render-test harness with committed reference frames that gates every change to the renderer.
Download Premation
No account needed. Projects are .motion files on your disk.
Every build is published on GitHub Releases, alongside the source it was built from.
- WindowsWindows 10 and 11 · x64.exeDownload
- macOSDetected OSApple silicon · Intel — pick your chip
- LinuxComing SoonNot currently supported
Opening it the first time
macOS blocks apps from unidentified developers, so the first open needs the right-click menu. Once, per copy of the app.
Drag Premation to Applications
Open the .dmg and drag it across. Take Premation-macOS-arm64.dmg on Apple silicon and Premation-macOS-x64.dmg on Intel. The arm64 build will not run on an Intel Mac at all.
Right-click it, then choose Open
Not a double-click. Control-click or right-click the app in Applications. The right-click route adds an Open button that a double-click does not offer.
Confirm Open in the dialog
That is the whole workaround. macOS remembers the decision for that copy, so normal double-clicking works from then on.
Both platforms only ask because the beta builds are unsigned. Signing removes the step on each, and no reinstall is needed when it lands. Setup and updates guide
System Requirement Notice
Premation renders every frame on the GPU via WebGPU or WebGL2 fallback. A hardware graphics processor is required.