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 17 of After Effects’ are supported.

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

Command — The unit of every mutation in the app: { id, label, shortcut, enabled(), execute() }. The menu bar, toolbar and palette are all thin renderers over the command registry, and every command is 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.

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 + G.

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.

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.

Render snapshot — A flat, immutable description of one frame, produced by sampling the animation engine at one time. Everything that draws — the viewport, previews, exports, the tests — 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.

WebGPU / WebGL2 — The two GPU tiers. WebGPU is preferred; WebGL2 is the fallback. The tier in use is shown in the viewport header. There is no software renderer.