Coming from After Effects
Premation is modelled on AE’s Classic 3D workflow. The tools, the panel layout and most of the keyboard shortcuts are where you expect them. This page is the diff.
The first-run tour offers to import an After Effects shortcut map. Accept it if you have muscle memory worth keeping. Every shortcut is rebindable afterwards in Window → Customize → Shortcuts.
What transfers directly
- All 17 blend modes, track and alpha mattes (including inverted).
- Parenting, null objects, adjustment layers, solids, shy / solo / lock.
- Keyframe assistants — easy ease, time-reverse, sequence layers, stagger.
- Expression controls — slider, angle, point, colour, checkbox, dropdown, layer.
- Pre-composing with Ctrl/⌘ + Shift + C, and time remapping on the result.
- The reveal chords. U shows only keyframed properties; bare P / S / R / T / A reveal position, scale, rotation, opacity and anchor point.
- F9 for easy ease, with Shift + F9 and Ctrl + Shift + F9 for in and out.
- Per-glyph text animators with a real range-selector stack.
- The Classic 3D layer model — flat planes in 3D space, lit and shadowed, with extrusion and bevels available on shapes and text.
Shortcut differences worth knowing
| Action | After Effects | Premation |
|---|---|---|
| Direct selection | V then sub-select | Shift + V — its own tool |
| Rectangle / Ellipse | Q cycles | Q / Shift + Q |
| Pen | G | G — same |
| Text | Ctrl + T | Ctrl + T — same |
| Puppet pin | Ctrl + P | Ctrl + P — same |
| Bone tool | (no equivalent) | Ctrl + B |
| Graph editor | Shift + F3 | Shift + G |
| Command palette | (no equivalent) | Ctrl + Shift + P |
| Camera navigation | C cycles | C cycles — orbit → pan → dolly |
Full table: Keyboard shortcuts.
Deliberate differences
New compositions are born on the dashboard
There is no Composition → New Composition… in the editor menus. A project is created from the dashboard with its size, frame rate and duration; further compositions inside a project are managed from the Project panel. One home per action is a design rule here, not an oversight.
The timeline is calm by default
Every layer is a single row showing one neutral block that summarises where its keyframes are. Expanding it — the chevron, or U — splits it into one sub-row per animated property. AE shows you the full property tree the moment you twirl; Premation shows you the animated subset first.
Property rows carry live scrubbable value fields, so a whole animation can be built without crossing to the inspector.
Position X and Y are independent tracks
They can be keyframed and eased separately without separating dimensions first.
The inspector is seven panels, each with its own search
Searching “color” surfaces Appearance; searching “pick whip” surfaces Parenting. Matched sections open themselves. It is closer to a searchable Effect Controls than to AE’s fixed twirl-down stack.
Everything is one command registry
The menu bar, the toolbar and the command palette are thin renderers over a
single registry. A greyed-out menu item means that command’s enabled()
returned false — the same check the palette and the toolbar use.
What Premation has that AE does not
- An AI director with a caster architecture — the model chooses techniques by taste from a validated candidate list, and deterministic libraries emit the keyframes through 62 typed tools. Every run lands as one reversible edit. See The AI assistant.
- A bone tool — a real skeleton with forward kinematics, linear blend skinning and FABRIK IK, on flat 2D artwork.
- Deterministic export by construction. Frame time is
index / fps, never wall-clock, so two exports of the same project are identical frame for frame. - Lottie export, alongside import.
- Sandboxed plugins — a Worker realm with no DOM, no
fetchand nolocalStorage, with permissions approved before any code loads. - A command palette that also searches layers, compositions and timecodes.
What is missing, honestly
| AE feature | Status here |
|---|---|
| Multi-track NLE / clip-based editing | Not a goal — this is not a video editor |
| Imported 3D models, PBR materials, HDRI | Out of scope |
| Real-time collaboration | Not implemented, not planned |
| Comments, approval flow, review links | Removed outright |
| Roto Brush, Content-Aware Fill, tracking | Not implemented |
| Ray-traced / Cinema 4D renderer | Not implemented — Classic 3D only |
| Essential Graphics authoring UI | Template fields work; the authoring UI is TODO |
The complete list is on Known gaps.
Where the 3D model diverges
The target is AE’s Classic 3D and it gets most of the way there — real 4×4 matrix projection, a pinhole camera with focal length in composition-space pixels, per-fragment Lambert + Blinn-Phong lighting, Z-sorting, depth-of-field blur, extrusion and bevels.
The differences that will bite first:
- A layer can be made 3D if it has a Transform component. Solids were historically pinned by the renderer and could not.
- Draft 3D is a toggle for interaction speed, not a separate render quality ladder.
See 3D layers.