Glossary

Adjustment layer — A layer with no content whose effects apply to everything rendered beneath it.

Anchor point — The origin a layer rotates and scales around. Moved without moving the layer using the Pan Behind tool (Y).

ARAP — As-rigid-as-possible. The solver behind puppet deformation; it resists shearing, so artwork bends rather than smearing.

Blend mode — How a layer combines with what is already drawn beneath it. All 38 of After Effects’ are supported. Every term here also has its own page under /glossary.

Bone — One segment of a skeleton. See Bones & IK.

Command — Two things share the word. An interface command is an entry in the registry the menu bar, toolbar and command palette all render from. An engine command is what actually changes the document: a plain value with an exact inverse, sent to the engine, which is what makes every edit undoable.

Composition — A canvas with a size, frame rate, duration and background, plus a stack of layers.

Draft 3D — A viewport-only toggle that trades shading fidelity for interaction speed. Never affects the export.

Dawn — The library Chromium uses for WebGPU. Premation’s engine uses it to drive the GPU directly: Direct3D 12 on Windows, Metal on macOS.

Engine (premation-engine) — The native C++ process that holds the document and draws every frame. The editor is its interface: it sends commands and shows the frames that come back. If the engine stops, the editor restarts it and replays your work. See How a frame is rendered.

Entrance archetype — A parameter the AI’s animation tools take, so generated scenes do not all enter the same way. Six exist: rise, scale_pop, blur_resolve, slide_settle, mask_wipe, char_cascade.

Expression — Code that computes a property’s value every frame, instead of sampling a track. See Expressions.

FABRIK — Forward And Backward Reaching Inverse Kinematics. The IK solver used for chains longer than two bones.

FK / IK — Forward kinematics: rotate a bone, children follow. Inverse kinematics: move a target, the chain solves to reach it.

Frame blending — Interpolating between source frames when a video’s frame rate does not match the composition’s, instead of duplicating or dropping them.

Graph editor — The value and speed curve editor. Shift + F3 in the timeline; the Graph panel hosts the same editor.

Hold — An interpolation type with no interpolation: the value jumps at the next keyframe.

Keyframe — A time, a value and an interpolation, on a track.

Layer-local time — The time axis keyframes are written and read on, resolved by the engine’s remapped-time function. Not “composition time minus clip start”; mixing the two is a known source of bugs.

Linear blend skinning — How a mesh follows a skeleton: each vertex takes weighted influence from nearby bones.

Lottie — bodymovin JSON. Imported as baked tracks; exported for vector shapes and transform tracks only.

Luma matte / alpha matte — Using one layer’s luminance or alpha to decide another layer’s transparency. See Masks & mattes.

MOGRT — After Effects’ Essential Graphics template. Premation’s templates are the same idea: a composition with selected fields exposed. Premation’s own MOGRT export is a .mogrt.zip package that only Premation can re-import; it is not an Adobe .mogrt.

Motion path — The spatial trajectory of an animated position, drawn on the canvas and editable there.

Null — An invisible layer with a full transform, used as a parent to move a group.

Pasteboard — The area of the stage outside the composition frame. Its colour is set in Composition Settings → Environment.

Pre-comp — A composition nested inside another. Its subtree renders to its own framebuffer and composites as one unit.

Puppet pin — A control point on a generated mesh. Dragging it deforms the artwork around it.

Range selector — The part of a text animator that decides which glyphs an offset applies to, in units of characters, words or lines. Animating the selector — not the offset — is what produces per-glyph motion.

Frame description — A flat, immutable description of one frame, produced by evaluating the document at one time. Everything that draws — the viewport, the pop-out viewports, exports — draws from it.

Repeater — A shape operator that fans one shape into N copies, each with an offset transform.

Shy / Solo — Shy hides a layer from the timeline; solo renders only the soloed layers. The distinction catches people out.

Time remap — Keyframing a nested composition’s internal time, for holds, reverses and speed ramps.

Track — The list of keyframes on one property. A property is animated when it has a track.

Track matte — See luma matte / alpha matte.

Trim paths — A shape operator that reveals a portion of a stroke. Animating End gives a write-on; animating Offset with a fixed span gives a chase.

Two-node camera — A camera with a point of interest that it always looks at.

Native plugin — A plugin built against the native SDK: a compiled library plus a premation-plugin.json, loaded into the engine. It can add effects, presets, menu commands, panels, footage importers and export formats. Installed from the plugin store, a .pplugin file or the plugins folder. See Plugins.

Recovery copy — A copy of your project’s last autosave that Premation offers to save if the engine keeps stopping. See History, versions & recovery.