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Premation
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Public beta 0.3 for macOS and Windows

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.

Download for Windows
The Premation editor: a composition open on the canvas with its layer tree, timeline and transform inspector

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

WHAT IT DOES

A compositor, not a web animation toy

Layers on a timeline, keyframes on every numeric property, and a GPU render graph underneath all of it.

Flat layers in real 3D space

This is After Effects' Classic 3D model: flip a layer to 3D for Z position and X/Y rotation, then light it and shoot it. One- and two-node cameras with depth of field, lights that cast shadows, and extrusion with bevels for shapes and text.

A custom 3D view of the composition: the camera frustum, the comp plane standing in space above a ground grid, and a universal gizmo on the selected layer

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.

Stack shapes, text, images, video, audio, SVG, Lottie and nested comps in one timeline. Composite them with 36 of After Effects’ 38 blend modes, masks, track mattes and 10 layer styles. A pre-comp renders through its own camera until you collapse transformations and let it meet the host’s.

00:00:04:12
Layer NameSwitches
1Title / lockup
2Product plate
3bg_gradient
4grade_adjust
5Subtitle
6lower_third
7grain_pass
0s2s4s6s8s10s
Shift-Ggraph editor7 layers

An assistant that writes keyframes, not video

It calls the same 62 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.

AI Assistant • Tool Execution LogBYOK Active

“Stagger the five cards in from the left, 4 frames apart, easing out.”

Reversible Edit
Cmd + Z to Undo

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.

MP4 Standard
H.264 · AAC

The default for sharing. Needs ffmpeg.

WebM Alpha
VP9 · Opus

Smaller than MP4, plays on the web.

MOV Alpha
ProRes 4444

Lossless hand-off. Large. Needs ffmpeg.

GIF Standard
GIF89a

Palettised across the animation. No audio.

PNG sequence Alpha
zip of PNGs

The archival option. Audio rides along.

Lottie Standard
bodymovin JSON

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.

KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS

Your After Effects hands already know this

Same tool keys, same reveal keys, same F9. The layer model matches too, so muscle memory transfers before preference does.

V

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.

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

Freeforever

The whole editor on your own machine, under the AGPL.

Download
  • Every tool: compositions, graph editor, 2.5D, rigging, particles
  • No account, no network. Projects are .motion bundles on disk
  • Export to every format, offline, with no watermark
  • The AI assistant with your own provider key
  • AGPL-3.0 source: read it, build it, fork it

The assistant needs the desktop app and an OS keystore to hold your key. Everything else runs anywhere the app does.

Cloud

Public Beta
Freein beta

Everything 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 registry, and update checks
  • The AI assistant with 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 0.3.0. 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.

Premation

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.

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.

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

Specs

GPU & System Specs

Graphics ProcessorDedicated GPU (NVIDIA/AMD) or Apple Silicon (M1/M2/M3/M4)The engine picks WebGPU when it can and falls back to WebGL2; there is no software rasteriser. The tier it landed on is shown in the viewport header, and if both fail it says so rather than showing a blank stage.
Integrated GraphicsIntel Iris Xe / AMD Radeon Graphics with current driversFine for lighter compositions. Note that a WebGL2 fallback can report a maximum texture size of 4096, which bounds how far Continuous Rasterization will re-raster vector content.
System Memory8GB RAM minimum / 16GB+ recommendedMemory scales with composition resolution and cached pre-comps. Export is the exception: frames stream to disk one at a time, so peak export memory is one frame rather than the whole render.
Operating systemWindows 10 / 11 x64 & macOS 13+ (Apple Silicon & Intel)A desktop application running in Electron with native menus and filesystem access. Building from source needs Node.js 20 or newer; ffmpeg is optional for MP4, WebM, GIF and ProRes export.