What shipped, and when

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.