The engine

What is in it

A separate process

premation-engine is started and supervised by the desktop app. It owns the document and the renderer; the editor changes the document through the engine's command API, and every command has an inverse for undo.

GPU through Dawn

The engine draws with Dawn, the WebGPU library Chromium uses, on Direct3D 12 on Windows and Metal on macOS. There is no software renderer: on a machine with no usable GPU the app says so and quits.

Measured speed

The viewport holds full frame rate on every benchmark composition in the repository. The layer-styles composition went from 19 fps to a steady 30, an Inner Shadow on a 1080p layer from about a second per frame to 3 ms, and Stroke from 0.8 s to about 1 ms. These are the project's own benchmarks, not a comparison with other software.

Crash-safe recovery

If the engine stops, the editor keeps running, restarts the engine and replays your work. If it keeps failing you are offered a recovery copy of the project instead of losing it.

Pop-out viewports

Each pop-out window renders live from the engine, alongside the main viewport.

One engine for export

The Render Queue, Export and the command line all render through the same engine, so a file matches the preview.

Projects carry over

The .motion format and its migrations did not change in 0.9.0.

The old TypeScript engineNot in it

There is no fallback engine. The JavaScript plugin system that ran on it was removed with it; see Plugins.