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 default keymap already follows After Effects’ toolbar keys, so there is nothing to import. Every shortcut is rebindable in Window → Customize → Shortcuts.
What transfers directly
- All 38 blend modes — Dissolve and Dancing Dissolve included — plus track and alpha mattes (including inverted), Stencil and Silhouette, and Preserve Underlying Transparency.
- Parenting, null objects, adjustment layers, solids, guide layers, shy / solo / lock, and label colours you can select a whole group by.
- Keyframe assistants — easy ease, exponential scale, time-reverse, sequence layers with overlap, stagger, and Motion Sketch.
- 275 effects across the folders you already know: Blur & Sharpen, Color Correction, Stylize, Generate, Distort, Perspective, Channel, Keying, Simulation, Time, Transition and Utility.
- All ten layer styles — the nine you know, plus Glass — and they take keyframes.
- 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 + F3 — same |
| Command palette | (no equivalent) | Ctrl + Shift + P |
| Camera navigation | C cycles | C cycles — unified → orbit → pan → dolly |
| Knife | (no equivalent) | Shift + K |
| J / K / L | Shuttle | Shuttle in the viewport; with the timeline focused, J / K are previous / next keyframe |
Full table: Keyboard shortcuts.
Deliberate differences
A project starts on the dashboard
A project is created from the dashboard with its size, frame rate and duration. Further compositions are made with Composition → New Composition… and managed from the composition list at the top of the Layers panel. Imported media lives in the Assets panel instead; the two are not one Project panel as they are in After Effects.
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.
Separate Dimensions is a switch, as in After Effects
Position is one property with a spatial path. To keyframe and ease X and Y on their own tracks, turn on Separate Dimensions in the Graph panel’s motion path controls.
One Properties panel, with a search
Everything about the selected layer is one scrolling Properties panel: Transform, the settings for that kind of layer, appearance, text, layer styles, effects, blending and switches. A section that does not apply to the selection is not drawn. Searching “color” surfaces Appearance; searching “parent” surfaces Blending and switches. Effect Controls (F3) still exists as a panel of its own. See The inspector.
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 73 typed tools. Every run lands as one reversible edit. See The AI assistant. Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor or Antigravity can also drive the same tools from outside the app — see Connecting an 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.
- Native plugins with crash isolation, and a store — an SDK modelled on the
After Effects plugin API (effects, plus AEGP-style commands and panels, AEIO
importers and output modules), where a plugin that faults disables only its own
effect instance rather than the engine. Install from the plugin store, a
.ppluginfile or a folder. See Plugins. - A native engine in its own process. If the engine stops, the editor keeps running, restarts it and replays your work.
- Opening After Effects projects directly.
.aepand.aepxopen with an import report of what came across. See Opening After Effects projects. - A command palette that also searches layers, compositions and timecodes.
What is missing, honestly
| AE feature | Status here |
|---|---|
| Editing video | Clip tools are present — razor, slip, slide, roll, ripple delete, a source monitor, multicam — on a layer-per-row timeline. See Cutting clips. Not a replacement for Premiere on long-form work |
| Imported 3D models, PBR materials, image skies | Present, but newer and less proven than After Effects’ — glTF import, a PBR shading mode and image skies. See Lights & materials |
| Real-time collaboration | Not implemented, not planned |
| Comments, approval flow, review links | Removed outright |
| Tracking | Point tracking is one-click — see Motion tracking. A corner (planar) tracker and a 3D camera solver exist too, but are newer and less proven than mocha or After Effects’ 3D Camera Tracker |
| Roto Brush, Content-Aware Fill | Present, and less proven than After Effects’ |
| Ray-traced / Cinema 4D renderer | Not implemented — Classic 3D only |
| Essential Graphics / MOGRT | Template fields are authored in the Library panel’s Templates section and exported as a Premation template package. It is not an Adobe .mogrt, and Premiere cannot open it |
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:
- Draft 3D is a toggle for interaction speed, not a separate render quality ladder.
See 3D layers.