What shipped, and when

The video release: one-click motion tracking, speed ramps, Smart Animate, captions, auto-reframe and a headless CLI.

• One-click motion tracking: click the thing you want followed and get keyframes, tracked both directions from the playhead, with rotation and scale carried by a companion point. Feature choice, window sizes and search radius are measured from the footage instead of asked.
• Speed ramps: ease a video, audio or pre-comp layer into 25 / 50 / 200% or a freeze at the playhead — written as two exact keyframes on an editable curve, not ninety baked ones. Slowing down turns on Pixel Motion frame blending.
• Smart Animate: design two boards, name the elements the same, and get the transition between them as ordinary keyframes — matched layers move into place, departures fade out, arrivals fade in. Neither board is touched.
• Animate In / Out: select layers, press once, and they arrive one after another — varied entrances on an uneven stagger, under a project-wide Motion Feel (Snappy / Smooth / Bouncy).
• Beat-synced timing: markers on the beats of the composition's audio, and animate commands that land entrances on them.
• Captions: import .srt/.vtt, generate from the composition's own audio, restyle and re-time them as ordinary text layers, and export back out.
• Auto-reframe: retarget a 16:9 edit to 9:16, 1:1, 4:5 or 4:3 — a new composition instancing the original, with a subject-following pan that jumps cleanly at cuts.
• The headless CLI: premation render / reframe / captions / comps drive the editor's own engine from a terminal, including CSV-driven batch renders with per-row template fills.
• Video pipeline rebuilt: demuxing off the main thread, decoded frames retained as ImageBitmaps, an analysis proxy tier for tracking, a RAM preview that fills while paused, and a settable disk cache budget.
• Editor chrome overhauled — menus, modals, panels and tokens — plus an "Animate selection" section at the top of the Presets panel gathering the motion features in one place.
• 3D lighting: aim lights by rotation, land beams on surfaces, and occlude shadows.
• Updates now show a standing “Restart to update” button instead of a toast you can miss.

A plugin platform that reaches the renderer, effects went 65 → 154, and rigging closed the gap to DUIK and Rive.

• Plugin effects: a plugin declares typed parameters and a shader body, and the host writes the pipeline, the uniform layout and the draw call — verified against a real GPU.
• Plugin layer kinds, per-plugin storage, and network access limited to the hosts the manifest declared.
• Publish from inside the editor, choose who can see it, hide or withdraw your own plugin; a reviewer queue, reporting, and a signed revocation list behind it.
• The package digest is pinned in metadata before the bytes move, and a pre-authorised key rotation is told apart from an arbitrary one.
• Plugins became a hosted-build feature: absent in the open-source local edition, but a project containing plugin content still opens and saves losslessly.
• Effects rounds three and four: 65 → 154, across ten browser folders, plus 25 Looks and transition presets built on them.
• Auto-rig presets for biped and quadruped, per-chain IK/FK switching that preserves the pose, controllers, and per-vertex numeric weights.
• Taper and Wave stroke profiles that compose with dashes, gradient strokes exposing every stop, and animated dash offset.
• Fill a template from a data table — forty lower-thirds from forty CSV rows, one row per undo entry.
• A bounce assistant, Motion Sketch, Exponential Scale, Sequence Layers with a real cross-dissolve, and scaling a keyframe selection in time.
• Expressions: toComp, toWorld, fromComp, fromWorld, sourceRectAtTime, keyframe access and marker.*; convert to keyframes, or disable one without deleting it.
• Preserve Underlying Transparency, comp markers on Shift+1..9, guide and shy layers, label-coloured selection outlines, and export/import of preset bundles.
• Animated SVG import corrected in twelve separate ways, and the local edition now opens on your recent projects.
• The 3D engine: extrusion faces carry the layer properly, walls can be lit from one side, and the camera is pinned against both of its placement paths.

The effects breadth pass: twenty new effects, and path operators became a real chain.

• The blur family: Gaussian, Fast Box, Radial.
• The colour family: Exposure, Vibrance, Colorama.
• The stylize family: Mosaic, Find Edges, Roughen Edges.
• The keying and matte family: Set Matte, Simple Choker, Linear Color Key, Shift Channels.
• The transition family: Venetian Blinds, Gradient Wipe, Card Wipe.
• Lens Flare, Numbers, Timecode and Audio Spectrum — with the honest limit on the last two stated in the code.
• Path operators became an ordered, stackable chain (schema 1.3.0), so operators survive a reorder.

Compositing reached 36 of After Effects' 38 blend modes, and templates got protected time.

• Stencil and Silhouette modes, bringing blend modes to 36 of AE's 38.
• Scope an individual effect to a mask region.
• Protected time regions in templates, with a marking UI.
• The repeater's three missing parameters: per-copy anchor, start offset, composite order.
• Wiggle Paths gained its time term and actually wiggles.
• Live boolean merge wired into the menus.
• Scale a keyframe selection in time.
• The local edition stopped shipping the assistant it could not key.

Packaging and release-pipeline fixes on top of the first public build.

• Installer and auto-update corrections for the first tagged releases.

The first public build: macOS and Windows, open source under AGPL-3.0.

• Compositions, keyframes, the graph editor, text animators, Classic 3D, rigging, particles and the deterministic export pipeline.