What shipped, and when

Cut people and objects out of footage with Object Matte, import Photoshop, Illustrator and PDF files, and play heavy compositions about twice as fast.

• Object Matte: click a person or object to separate it, track it through the shot, put text behind it, blur or replace the background, and fill the gap it leaves from the frames where the background shows.
• Photoshop files import as a composition of their layers, PDF and Illustrator files as vector footage, EXR stays float, and JSON or CSV data can be read from expressions. ProRes, DNx and MXF footage is no longer transcoded to 8-bit.
• The Render Queue writes several outputs from one render, adds DNxHR, HEVC, AV1 and TIFF and DPX sequences, and has post-render actions and render-settings templates.
• Playback builds frames on more than one core, so a composition with thousands of layers plays about twice as fast before it is cached. Scrubbing answers at once, and the viewer says when it is still rendering or dropping frames.
• A Display P3 working space with HDR and camera-log footage, Blend Colors Using 1.0 Gamma as in After Effects, a keyframeable box behind text, and copy, paste and mirror for skeleton poses.
• Help ▸ Report a Problem sends a screenshot and safe diagnostics, checkout opens in your browser, Check for Updates shows what changed, and plugins can draw their own Effect Controls and dock their panels as tabs.

Keyframes behave the way After Effects users expect: smooth Auto Bezier, eases on the right side of the key, and a graph editor that no longer blinks while you drag.

• Auto Bezier keys are smooth through the key, Easy Ease In and Out apply to the key's own arrival and departure, and keys can be dragged past their neighbors. The value graph draws every curve on one shared axis.
• Dragging a keyframe or handle in the graph editor stays steady: the curve follows the keys, the first move is not lost and value snapping follows the Snapping toggle.
• Time-remapped and speed-ramped footage exports with its sound following the picture, instead of refusing the export.
• A new chrome icon set drawn on the After Effects grid, and a right-click on a keyframe opens its menu every time.
• Steadier on more machines: a burst of edits no longer gets a healthy engine stopped as hung, a computer without WebGPU draws frames through Canvas 2D, and Help ▸ Copy Diagnostics Report makes a problem easy to send.

After Effects-style expressions and scripts, an Essential Graphics panel, the interface in three more languages, and projects with non-English file names open again.

• Expressions take After Effects' statement language (variables, conditions, functions, loops, effect()), show errors with line numbers, and work on effect parameters. File ▸ Scripts runs scripts against the project once you allow it.
• An Essential Graphics panel builds a template's editable fields, saved with the composition.
• The interface is available in Simplified Chinese, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese.
• Fifty-six deeper effects built on a new effect-graph engine, including simulations.
• On a Windows set to Japanese or another non-English language, a project whose files have non-English names no longer stops the engine or fails its export.

Premation ships for Linux, with a calmer set of panels, After Effects units in the Character panel and a full camera toolkit.

• Linux joins Windows and macOS as an x64 AppImage, with the same engine, bundled ffmpeg and fonts, and in-place updates.
• Camera rigs for crane, dolly and orbit, Follow Path, Fly to Selected Layers, shake, depth compositing, camera import and export, and a New Camera dialog that asks what you are doing.
• The Character panel scrubs Size, Leading and Tracking in After Effects units, with real italics of system fonts and synthesized small caps.
• A RAM cache tier and an After Effects-style disk cache, with honest cache bars on the timeline.

Video export works on a clean computer: every installer now ships the ffmpeg it encodes with, and repairs it in one click.

• Until this release, exporting MP4, WebM, GIF or ProRes needed ffmpeg already installed. Now a pinned build ships inside every installer, for Windows and macOS.
• If export cannot run it, Premation says why in plain words and offers Fix video export, a one-click repair, instead of a failed job.
• Plugin listings carry an icon, screenshots, an About section and notes for every version.
• The macOS engine builds again, so 1.0 is available on macOS as well as Windows.

Premation 1.0: assistants that work in your project from outside the app, a full plugin platform, sixty more After Effects effects and a much faster 3D renderer.

• Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and Antigravity in Premation. Connect any of them from Dashboard ▸ Connections and ask for motion graphics in the project you have open. You watch every change and can stop it. Free on every plan; the connection stays on your computer.
• Plugins that go far beyond effects. SDK 1.2 plugins can add menu commands, panels that pop out into their own window, importers, export formats, presets and on-canvas handles. Premation's own plugins, starting with a 3D model renderer, come with Premation Cloud; every third-party plugin stays free.
• Sixty more After Effects effects (215 → 275), plus ink, Roughen Edges, dither and a bundled font set with per-character fallback to your system fonts.
• Faster 3D and playback: 3D surface chains are cached and sized to the layer, shadow maps, SSAO and reflections are reused between frames, and Auto resolution no longer pumps. Radiance .hdr skies and an engine-drawn ground grid.
• More reliable: a layer larger than the GPU's texture limit no longer blanks the frame, a busy renderer is not killed as hung, and edits in flight survive an engine restart.

A new engine. Everything you see, play and export is now drawn by a native C++ engine running in its own process, with the editor as its interface.

• Faster where it used to hurt: the viewport renders every benchmark composition faster than before and holds full frame rate on all of them. The layer-styles composition went from 19 fps to a steady 30.
• Layer styles moved to the GPU: an Inner Shadow on a 1080p layer went from about a second per frame to 3 ms, Stroke from 0.8 s to about 1 ms. All 393 effect benchmarks now run above 24 fps, and faded or mask-scoped effects stay on the GPU.
• Export runs in the engine. The Render Queue, Export and the command line all render through the same engine, including 16-bit ProRes 4444 with alpha, HDR10 and HLG (10-bit HEVC, BT.2020).
• Crash-safe by design: if the engine stops, the editor keeps running, restarts it and replays your work; if it keeps failing you are offered a recovery copy of the project.
• More of After Effects' Layer menu: Create Shapes / Masks from Text from the font's own outlines, Convert to Editable Shapes and Editable Text for SVG, Separate layers, Uncompose a precomp. Pop-out viewports each render live from the engine.
• Removed: the JavaScript/WGSL plugin system. Projects that used such plugins still open; their plugin effects and layers are removed as one undoable step, with a notice. Native (C++ SDK) plugins are unaffected.

Open an After Effects project directly, and a plugin publishing screen that is no longer a pop-up.

• File > Open takes .aep and .aepx: compositions, layers and parenting, transforms with keyframes and easing, masks, text with its font and tracking, and effects matched by name. Missing footage is relinked by filename where it can be found and listed where it cannot; the import report says what came across and what did not.
• Timeline editing in bulk: select a range of clips, drag a group as one bar, stagger a selection (including a zigzag), zoom anchored to the pointer, and nudge by less than a frame.
• Publishing a plugin has a real workspace: your listings down one side, the one you are editing beside them with tabs for details, media, guide and changelog, and a save bar that appears only when something is unsaved. (The JavaScript plugin system it served was removed in 0.9.0.)
• The cloud dashboard reads like a tool: the selected sidebar item is now legible (2.80:1 to 4.73:1 contrast), the format filter is a segmented control, and render rows show a failure reason inline.

Twixtor-style retime, a redesigned sidebar and Properties panel, and platform-native window chrome.

• Retime a layer by Speed % or by frames, with a speed graph and presets in the inspector; slow motion now blends between frames instead of stepping.
• The sidebar rails and the Properties panel were rebuilt: fewer panels with labels, one scrolling Properties column with paired compact rows, Effects and Text folded in.
• macOS gets a unified toolbar; Windows keeps a title bar with the OS caption buttons.
• Native plugin hosting and engine hardening landed alongside.

Text that reads like After Effects set it, and shapes that keep their corners.

• Real multilingual text: full right-to-left and bidirectional layout (Arabic and Hebrew mixed with Latin in one line), vertical writing with tate-chu-yoko and kinsoku line-breaking for CJK, and true optical kerning. Source-text expressions can drive what a text layer says.
• Time Stretch on any layer, not just footage.
• Rounded rectangles stay rounded under every path operator, Merge Paths boolean and the Knife, with animated radii honoured throughout.
• Projected shadows no longer paint over the layer casting them; the Properties panel stopped re-rendering itself in a loop; Object Matte installs reliably.

Sound, brought up to the level of the rest of the app.

• An Audio panel that mixes: a VU meter with clipping indicators and peak hold, and faders for the selected layer's level and pan. Level and Pan are keyframeable from the inspector.
• Fade In and Fade Out in one click (ordinary keyframes), a Noise Gate, and new Compressor, Distortion and De-esser effects matching After Effects 26.3.
• Audio Spectrum and Audio Waveform can follow a path, including a circle. Audio-only preview plays sound from the playhead at true speed; Numpad * drops a marker while it plays.

A refreshed interface: new controls, a searchable Properties panel and an Assets toolbar.

• New styling for buttons, inputs, sliders, switches, tabs and segmented controls on updated theme tokens.
• Properties panel: search the selected layer's properties, an options menu and layer actions in the header, a 3x3 anchor-snap grid, and a presets menu.
• Assets panel toolbar: New Folder, add to composition or at the playhead, Interpret Footage, New Composition from Footage.

3D that behaves: directable cameras, lighting fixes, nested comps in 3D and eighteen more effects.

• Cameras you can direct: Camera Options and Light Options in the timeline, every camera listed by name to look through, Layer > Camera > Distribute Layers in Z for instant parallax, and a Camera preset folder (Push In, Orbit Sweep, Dolly Zoom, Handheld).
• Lighting fixes: no more phantom second light, new 3D layers answer lights and shadows out of the box, and 3D solids cast shadows in both shadow modes. A composition placed as a layer renders its 3D through its own camera and lights.
• Deep Glow (a physically based glow with a long tail), Energy Beam with twenty presets, Particles v2 and Plexus.
• Eighteen more After Effects effects, each a GPU shader with a CPU reference, and twenty more effect presets.
• Tracking and masks: Write-on and Vegas follow a mask path, draw around an object to get a mask, and the Object Matte neural model ships with the app.

The GPU release: 177 of 183 effects run as shaders, camera and time verbs in the Layer menu, and a bug batch across tracker, typography and import.

• Effects run on the GPU: 177 of 183 effects render as shaders — every keyer, distortion, transition, blur, noise, stylize, interior layer style, particle generator and the auto colour corrections. Video with effects or motion tracks plays at full speed instead of dropping to a per-frame CPU bake.
• A cpu fx row in the viewport HUD names the six that still bake: Vegas, Numbers, Timecode, Audio Spectrum, Audio Waveform, Lightning.
• Layer ▸ Camera: Create Orbit Null, Set / Link Focus Distance to a layer or to the point of interest; Look at Selected / All under View ▸ Viewport ▸ 3D View. New lights bring an Ambient Fill so the unlit side of a 3D object is no longer black.
• Layer ▸ Time: reverse, freeze frame, enable time remapping, time stretch and the speed ramps on the selected layers.
• Smoother 3D handling: dragging a 3D object, camera or light no longer shows the gizmo running ahead of it; the 3D Rotation and Orientation rows all edit their values.
• Puppet: tighter outline meshes on character cut-outs, bend pins that keep a rigid core and let the mesh solve the transition, and pins placed on a posed character land where you clicked.
• Bug batch: tracker overlay no longer reads as broken video; Character panel typography (case, small caps, super/subscript, scale, baseline, stroke) renders; one-sided keyframe navigators on every property row; Library duplicates removed; channel views and the frame cache agree; Lottie trim paths and animated SVG first frames import correctly.
• UX batch: design tokens with a density tier and a high-contrast theme, native menus generated from one model, mixed-value multi-select editing in the inspector, camera bookmarks, snapshot / wipe compare, timeline auto-follow, markers, lift / extract / ripple, and a faster playhead clock.
• Counts, derived from the source: 183 effects, all 38 blend modes, 65 assistant tools, 18 export formats including HDR10, HLG, EXR sequences and EDL / OTIO / FCPXML / ALE hand-offs.

The editing release: a source monitor and real edit tools, one graph editor, floating tool windows, a docked Export panel and a job tray you can see.

• Source Monitor with in/out points, JKL shuttle and Insert / Overwrite / Add to end / New comp from range.
• Timeline edit tools as visible modes — Selection, Razor, Slip, Slide, Roll — with clip-edge snapping, Fit Composition and Fit Work Area.
• Per-cut transitions, Assemble from Footage, a Scopes panel, a Transcript panel with text-based editing, silence removal and ducking, and chapters from markers.
• One graph editor with parametric stagger, modifier stacks, audio-reactive drivers, bake dynamics, and the Smoother and the Wiggler as real dialogs.
• Composition Settings, Keyframe Velocity, the Smoother, the Wiggler and Interpret Footage are floating tool windows: drag them by the title, keep working behind them, Enter confirms.
• Window ▸ Export docks the export form beside the inspector so you queue renders without leaving the timeline.
• Renders, cache passes, transcription and model downloads show a progress toast and sit in the status-bar job tray, with Reveal file when a render lands.
• Autosave settings — interval, snapshots to keep, an optional folder — and the last autosave time in the status bar.
• 3D: image skies and reflections, the full glTF PBR map set, curved primitives, a material editor, shadow maps, SSAO, Composition Settings ▸ World, and 3D IK on parented layers.
• A knife tool, on-canvas gradient editor, smart guides, project swatches, multi-select transform, and per-pixel depth-of-field for 3D groups.
• Start screen with search, sort, pinned projects and a Templates row; a power-user tour; a ? on every panel header that opens the matching docs; Version History can compare a saved version with the live comp.

Real meshes in the 3D engine, and the viewport learned After Effects' manipulation grammar.

• glTF/GLB model import as ordinary layers, with baked animation clips, CPU-skinned meshes against joint layers, morph targets as animatable props, and toon shading as a third reflectance model.
• Environment Light: image-based lighting through the existing light rig.
• Viewport manipulation: axis lock, a drag HUD, hover states, Z scale, arc rings, fit selection and a cameraless orbit; camera moves motion-blur the scene.
• The transport moved under the stage and the track header gained After Effects' columns.
• Spatial roving keyframes, The Smoother and The Wiggler.
• The preview purge split from the disk cache, whose budget can now be set.

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.