Animation presets
A preset applies a named animation to the selected layer. Everything it creates is ordinary keyframes — retime them, re-ease them, delete half of them.
Apply from the top-bar Animate menu, or drag a preset onto a layer on the canvas.
There are five separate catalogues.
Animate a whole selection
Since 0.4, the top of the Presets panel is an “Animate selection” section — one place holding the feel picker, Animate In / Out, the beat row, speed ramps and Smart Animate.
Animate In is the headline: select some layers, press it, and they arrive
one after another — each with a different entrance, on an uneven stagger,
starting at the playhead in selection order. That variation is the point: one
entrance applied to everything is what makes motion look templated, and an
evenly spaced stagger is a metronome. Prefer one look for all of them?
Animate In: Rise / Pop / Slide / Wipe force it. Everything lands as ordinary
keyframes — open the graph editor and bend them.
Motion Feel (Animation ▸ Motion Feel: Snappy / Smooth / Bouncy) is a project-level taste setting: duration, travel, stagger and easing move together, because a snappy curve stretched over a slow duration reads as a mistake. Every choreography and beat command honours it.
Beat-synced timing drops markers on the beats of the composition’s audio and lets the animate commands land entrances on them — the music sets the rhythm, the feel decides how each entrance moves.
Composition-relative units
Presets resolve in composition-relative units, not absolute pixels. One authored against 1080p behaves correctly at 4K, at square and at vertical — a slide travels the same proportion of the frame rather than the same number of pixels.
Animation presets (15)
Applied to any layer.
| Preset | Kind |
|---|---|
| Fade In | Entrance |
| Pop In | Entrance |
| Slide In | Entrance |
| Rise Up | Entrance — the safe default |
| Fade Out | Exit |
| Zoom Out Exit | Exit |
| Spin | Loop |
| Pulse | Loop |
| Shake | Loop |
| Elastic Float | Loop |
| Flip In 3D | 3D |
| Swing In 3D | 3D |
| Depth Push In | 3D |
| 3D Twirl In | 3D |
| Cinematic Pan 3D | 3D — camera move |
The 3D presets need the layer to be 3D. Turn on the 3D switch in Transform first, and add a camera if the preset moves through space. See 3D layers.
Text presets (18)
These build real text animators with range selectors — open one up and you can retune the selector, not just the timing. They only apply to text layers.
In: Typewriter · Cascade · Decode · Focus Pull · Word Rise · Scatter In · Spring In
Out: Type Out · Dissolve Out · Fall Away · Converge Out
Emphasis and loops: Wave · Colour Sweep · Spotlight · Flicker · Jitter · Sway · Inch Worm
Behaviours (6)
Behaviours are ongoing, not one-shot — they describe how a layer keeps moving rather than how it arrives.
| Behaviour | What it does |
|---|---|
| Fade In+Out | Fades up and back down across the layer’s span |
| Auto-Scroll | Continuous travel |
| Drift | Slow ambient wander |
| Pendulum | Swings back and forth |
| Orbit | Circles a centre |
| Audio Throb | Driven by a referenced audio layer’s amplitude |
Audio Throb is the one worth knowing: it links motion to sound without any keyframing. See Audio.
Scenery (5)
Full-frame atmosphere rather than a layer’s entrance: Dissolve In · Blur Dissolve Out · Gradient Drift · Aurora · Drifting Noise.
Looks (25)
Unlike the four catalogues above, these are effect stacks rather than keyframe tracks — a graded, treated or transitioned look applied in one step. They are ordinary effects once applied, so open one and retune it.
Grades: Teal & Orange · Bleach Bypass · Faded Film · Night Grade · Cross Process · Selective Colour Pop · Clean Skin · Restore Old Footage
Treatments: Anamorphic Bokeh · Comic Book · Newsprint · Oil Painting · Kaleidoscope Mandala · Chromatic Lens · Broadcast Interference
Transitions: Iris In · Hex Iris Out · Light Wipe In · Grid Dissolve Out · Line Sweep Out · Burn Away · Page Turn Out · Ripple Through · Split Apart · Radial Light Burst
See the effect catalog for what each one is built from.
Saving your own
- Build the animation on a layer.
- Open the Presets inspector panel.
- Save it with a name.
It then appears in the Animate menu alongside the built-ins, and can be deleted from the Presets panel.
Saving happens in the Presets panel; applying happens in the Animate menu. One home per action — the same rule that keeps New Composition on the dashboard.
Saving a preset from a text layer captures the animator stack as well as the
tracks. The ta.* tracks are meaningless without the animators they index
into, so a preset saved without them would apply cleanly and do nothing.
Moving presets between machines
Presets panel → settings menu → Export / Import. Export writes every preset you have saved as one bundle; Import reads one back.
The result is reported as added, replaced and skipped, separately. An import that replaced six of your presets and said only “imported 6” reads as additive, and you would find out it was not when something you had is gone. Export disables itself when the bundle would be empty.
After applying one
Press U. The timeline shows exactly what the preset wrote — usually two or three keyframes on two or three properties. From there:
- Drag the diamonds to change the timing.
- Select the last keyframe and press F9 for a different settle.
- Use Stagger Animations to offset several layers that all got the same preset.