First launch

The two editions open on different screens. Which one you have decides everything on this page, so start here:

Edition	What you see first
Local (built from source)	Your recent projects. No account, no sign-in
Hosted (the installers)	A free sign-in screen

The local edition: recent projects

It opens on a list of the projects you have opened or saved before, newest first. Pick one, or start a new one.

A recent that no longer opens — the folder moved, the drive is not mounted — is marked on its own row rather than announced as an error. Your next move is to remove it or pick another, and both are right there.

Opening a project starts a fresh undo history. Undo belongs to the open document, so Ctrl/⌘ + Z can never step you backwards into the previous one.

The app opens on /login. Authentication is email and password against the companion server, with forgot-password and reset flows. If the server is not running, you will be bounced back to /login — the dashboard and editor are both behind an auth guard.

Route	Screen
`/login`	Sign in
`/register`	Create an account
`/forgot-password`	Request a reset email
`/reset-password`	Set a new password from the token in that email
`/dashboard`	Project dashboard (requires auth)
`/editor/:projectId`	The editor, bound to a project (requires auth)

Sessions are long-lived: refresh tokens live for 90 days and are stored in the operating system’s keychain rather than in the renderer.

The dashboard

The dashboard is where compositions are born. One project holds one composition to begin with, and you choose its size, frame rate and duration at creation time from a shared preset catalogue — the same catalogue the viewport header uses later, so the two never disagree.

Further compositions inside a project come from Composition → New Composition…, and are listed at the top of the Layers panel; see Compositions.

Create a project

Pick a name, then a size preset (or type a custom width and height), a frame rate, and a duration.

It opens in the editor

The editor loads at /editor/:projectId. The dashboard keeps a local SQLite index of known projects so the list is instant on next launch; if the native driver is unavailable the app falls back to an in-memory index rather than failing.

The onboarding tour

On first run an overlay offers a short tour of the workspace. It points at the real controls, and a step that asks you to do something advances when you have actually done it. You can replay it at any time from Help → Take a Tour, and Help → Power-user Tour goes further.

The default shortcuts already follow After Effects’ toolbar keys; see Coming from After Effects.

What you are looking at


┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ TitleBar        window chrome: minimize / maximize / close    │
├──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ TopNav          menu bar + tool rail + New Layer/Animate menus│
│ ToolOptionsBar  contextual options for the active tool        │
├───────────┬──────────────────────────────┬───────────────────┤
│ Left      │                              │  Right Inspector  │
│ Sidebar   │   Workspace (viewport)       │  Properties, Info,│
│ Project,  │                              │  Audio, Preview,  │
│ Effect    │                              │  Effects & Presets│
│ Controls, │                              │  Align, Character,│
│ Layers    │                              │  Paragraph        │
├───────────┴──────────────────────────────┴───────────────────┤
│ BottomTimeline  Timeline / Graph Editor + transport           │
├──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ StatusBar   save state · info readout · jobs · VU · timecode  │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Every region is a dock: panels register into a region, tabs reorder, move between the two sidebars, close and reopen. Panels that are not shown by default open from Window ▸ Panels or the + at the foot of each rail. The layout is persisted, and Window ▸ Workspace ▸ Reset Layout puts it back.

Any panel can be popped out into its own window, which stays live-synced with the editor — useful on a second monitor. A popped-out viewport renders live from the engine.

If the viewport says it is waiting for the engine’s first frame for more than a few seconds, or the app stops with a “cannot start” message, see Troubleshooting.

Full walkthrough: The interface.

The one shortcut to learn first

Ctrl/⌘ + Shift + P opens the command palette. It reaches every registered command, every layer, every composition and any timecode, and it works even while a text field has focus.

Prefix	What it searches
(plain text)	everything
`>`	commands
`@`	layers
`#`	compositions
`:`	timecode — jump to a time