Status bar

A single strip along the bottom. Four things live there.

Info readout

AE’s Info panel, condensed: the pixel colour swatch and RGBA under the pointer, plus the composition-space X, Y coordinates.

It shows a muted placeholder when the pointer is off the viewport, or when the colour cannot be read back — which is the case on the GPU backend in some configurations. It says so rather than showing you a stale or invented value.

FPS meter

Real frame rate, measured from requestAnimationFrame. Off by default — click to toggle it on.

Worth turning on when you are deciding whether a composition has got too heavy to work in comfortably, or when checking whether you landed on the WebGPU or WebGL2 tier. The tier itself is shown in the viewport header.

VU meter

Stereo peak bars, driven from the master left/right analysers.

It only draws while playing, and it is hidden entirely if Web Audio never produced an analyser — so an empty VU meter means “no audio path”, not “silence”.

See Audio.

Account button

Session state. Signed out, it opens the auth modal; signed in, it opens an account menu.

Signing in is only required for the parts that need the companion server: cloud projects, version history in the cloud, and the AI assistant. See Projects & storage.