Premation

A desktop motion-graphics application. Compositions, layers, keyframes, a graph editor, 2.5D space with cameras and lights, effects, masks and mattes, per-glyph text animators, mesh rigging, particles, and a deterministic export pipeline — drawn by a native C++ engine that runs in its own process and renders on the GPU (Direct3D 12 on Windows, Metal on macOS).

It is modelled on After Effects’ Classic 3D workflow. If you know AE, the tools, the panel layout and most of the keyboard shortcuts are already where you expect them. If you don’t, this documentation starts from zero: what hardware you need, what every panel does, and how to build an animation one keyframe at a time.

One source tree builds two editions. The open-source local edition runs entirely on your machine — no accounts, no network, projects as .motion bundles on disk — and the server edition, which the installers are, uses a free sign-in and adds optional cloud projects, sync and hosted rendering on top of a hosted backend. Editing, compositing, 3D, rigging, effects and export are identical in both, and the AI assistant is in both on your own key. Where a page describes something only one edition has, it says so. See the edition table.

Start here

To have an AI assistant you already use work in the project you have open, see Connect an assistant.

What it is good for

Motion design for the web and social. Logo animations, title cards, lower thirds, animated stickers, UI motion studies. Compose, keyframe, export MP4 for sharing or WebM with a real alpha channel to drop straight onto a page.

Animating vector artwork. Import an SVG and it arrives as one faithful layer you can convert to editable shapes; a simple animated SVG has its CSS or SMIL animation converted into real keyframes you can retime. Import a Lottie file and get its baked animation as tracks.

Character and prop animation without a 3D pipeline. The bone tool builds a skeleton with forward kinematics and IK; the puppet tool deforms a mesh from pins. Both work on ordinary 2D artwork.

Explainers and product shots in 2.5D. Push layers apart in Z, add a camera, animate a move through them, light them. Classic-3D-style shading, extrusion and bevels included.

Templated graphics. Build a composition once, expose the fields that should change — text, colours, and media slots that reframe whatever you drop into them under a fit policy — then fill them per output. The same idea as a MOGRT.

Batch rendering. Queue several compositions and resolutions, choose an output folder, and let them render while you keep working.

What it is not

• Not a replacement for a video editor on long-form work. It has real clip tools — razor, slip, slide and roll, a source monitor, multicam, editing from a transcript — but on a compositor’s timeline, where every clip is a layer. See Cutting clips.
• Not a 3D modelling application. The 3D model is AE’s Classic 3D: flat planes in 3D space, lit and shadowed, plus extrusion — with a PBR shading mode and imported glTF models added, which are newer and less proven.
• Not a collaboration tool. Review comments, the approval flow and shareable review links were removed outright, and live multi-user editing was never built. See Known gaps.

How this documentation is organised

A note on honesty in these docs

Where a feature is partial, gated or not implemented, the page says so rather than describing an intention as a fact. The complete list lives in Known gaps. If something here does not match what the app does, the app is right and the page is a bug.