The inspector
The right-hand dock. Seven panels are always present; three more are registered and open on demand.
| Panel | Always open | Opens from |
|---|---|---|
| Transform | Yes | — |
| Style | Yes | — |
| Rigging | Yes | — |
| Effects | Yes | — |
| Graph | Yes | — |
| Presets | Yes | — |
| Settings | Yes | — |
| History | No | Window menu |
| Render | No | Window → Render Queue |
| Plugins | No | Opens itself when a plugin with a panel runs, or from the Plugins menu |
Each panel has its own search box, matching section titles and intent
keywords — searching color surfaces Appearance, pick whip surfaces
Parenting. Matched sections open themselves.
The inspector does not yank you between tabs on every selection change. It only switches when the tab you are on genuinely cannot serve the thing you just selected — a camera, a light or a particle emitter, whose controls live in Settings.
Transform
- Transform — Position X/Y (and Z), Scale, Rotation, Opacity, Anchor Point, size. Every row has a stopwatch (the keyframe toggle) and a scrubbable value field. The 3D Layer switch lives here; turning it on adds Z, X rotation and Y rotation.
- Parent & Link — a parent picker that reparents without moving the layer on screen. The option list excludes the layer and its own descendants, so a parenting cycle is not expressible.
- Align & Distribute — align left / centre / right / top / middle / bottom, and distribute evenly.
Style
| Section | Contents |
|---|---|
| Appearance | Fill, stroke, gradients, corner radius |
| Text | Family, size, weight, letter-spacing, line-height, alignment, colour, and the text animators |
| Media | Source, trim, speed, fit, crop, volume |
| Compositing | Blend mode, track mattes |
| Layer switches | Motion blur, quality, shy, solo, lock |
| Layer Styles | Drop Shadow, Outer Glow |
| Audio | Level, in/out trim, mute, and the decoded waveform |
| Shape effects | The shape-operator ”+ Add” menu |
Camera, Light and Particle controls live in Settings, not here.
Rigging
Puppet controls — mesh density and expansion, which trigger a deterministic mesh rebuild, plus per-pin static rotation and stiffness.
Bone controls — chain editing, IK targets, pose.
Every edit is a single undo step. See Rigging.
Effects
The Effect Stack — this is AE’s Effect Controls. Each applied effect gets an enable toggle, reorder handles, a remove button, and one row per parameter.
Numeric parameters are keyframeable: the stopwatch writes a track under
effect.<id>.<param>, sampled per frame like any other property.
The Curves effect gets a dedicated tone-curve editor — drag points, click empty space to add one, Alt-click to remove one. Endpoints are pinned in X.
See The effect stack.
Graph
Two editors in one panel, and the home of two features that have no other door.
MotionEditorPanel — the large, direct-manipulation curve editor. It lists the selected layer’s animated properties; picking one draws its value-over-time curve with big draggable keyframes. Selecting a keyframe exposes easing presets, which reshape the curve live, and exact numeric entry.
It also owns the ease clipboard: Copy the ease from one keyframe, Paste it onto any other selection, across properties and layers. (This moved here when the duplicate Flow panel was removed.)
ExpressionEditor — a code editor for property expressions, with quick-insert autocomplete for the API, inline plain-language errors, a live value that updates as you scrub, and AI assist that produces an editable expression rather than a locked result. See Expressions.
Sequencing lives in the timeline; this panel owns how a value moves. The division is deliberate.
Presets
Save the selected layer’s animation as a named preset, and delete saved ones. Presets are applied from the top-bar Animate menu — one home per action.
Settings
Per-layer miscellany, plus the controls for layer kinds that have no other home:
- Camera — focal length, with mm presets.
- Light — colour, intensity, radius; all keyframeable.
- Particle — the emitter config block.
- Precomp — time remap and related controls.
- Time Controls — time stretch %, reverse, freeze frame, frame blending.
- Motion-path options — auto-orient.
- Version History — lists the project bundle’s snapshots; save and restore named versions.
History, Render and Plugins
Three on-demand panels that dock on the right like any other.
- History — Photoshop-style visual history. See History & versions.
- Render — the render queue. See Render queue.
- Plugins — third-party plugin UI. Docked rather than modal, because a plugin panel is for use while dragging on the canvas. See Plugins.
A panel that was removed
Motion Tools was a shortcut board for six properties other panels already owned — 3D toggle, time remap, trim paths, pre-compose, anchor point, label colour — and two of its writes were wrong: the label colour bypassed the setter so it never serialised, and time remap keyframed at composition time instead of converting to the layer axis, which lands on the wrong frame for a trimmed or stretched layer. Its trim in/out already existed in three other places. Use the owning panels instead.