Guide 01
Build your first animation
Start from an empty composition and finish with an exported file, using the real panels — toolbar, inspector, timeline, graph editor and the export dialog.
By the end of this you will have used most of the app: the composition, the toolbar, the inspector, the timeline, the graph editor and the export dialog. Nothing here is a toy path — it is the same route a real piece of work takes.
If you already know After Effects
Skim this. The tool keys, the reveal keys, F9 and the layer model are the ones you already use, and the differences are listed on the Coming from After Effects page rather than scattered through here.
1. Make the composition
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Create a new project — from the recent-projects screen in the local edition, or the dashboard in the hosted one.
What happens You are asked for a size, a frame rate and a duration before the editor opens. 1920 × 1080, 30 fps and 5 seconds is a fine start.
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Press Ctrl/⌘ + K if you want to change any of that later.
What happens Composition Settings opens, tabbed. Nothing you picked at creation is a commitment — size, rate and duration are all editable afterwards.
2. Put something on the stage
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Press Ctrl/⌘ + T for the Text tool, click on the canvas, and type a word.
What happens Editing happens on the canvas, not in a dialog. Enter commits, Esc cancels, and clicking away commits.
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Press V to return to the Selection tool.
What happens The text becomes an ordinary layer you can drag. Arrow keys nudge it; Shift + arrow nudges further.
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Open the Style tab in the right inspector and set the font, size, weight and colour.
What happens The font picker lists the fonts actually installed on your machine, and previews each one in its own family.
Other layer types
Layer ▸ New gives you Text, Solid…, Camera, Light, Null Object and Adjustment Layer. A null is the standard way to move several layers as one: parent them to it and animate the null.
3. Set keyframes
Switch to the Transform tab. Every row has a stopwatch to its left — that is the keyframe toggle, and clicking it is what turns a static property into an animated one.
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Press Home to put the playhead at frame 0, then click the stopwatch beside Opacity.
What happens A keyframe diamond appears at frame 0 holding the current value. The property is now animated.
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Drag the Opacity value down to 0.
What happens The keyframe at frame 0 updates. Nothing else moves — you have one key, so the value is constant.
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Move the playhead to about frame 20 and set Opacity back to 100.
What happens A second keyframe is written automatically. You did not have to click the stopwatch again — once a property is animated, changing its value at a new time makes a key there.
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Do the same with Position: at frame 0, about 60 px below its resting place; at frame 20, where it belongs.
What happens The layer now fades up while it rises.
The faster route
Alt + Shift + T keys opacity at its current value and Alt + Shift + P keys position, and both auto-reveal the row so you can see the diamond that just appeared.
4. Look at what you made
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Select the layer and press U.
What happens The timeline collapses to only the properties that have keyframes — Opacity and Position — one sub-row each, with draggable diamonds. This is the single most useful key in the timeline.
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Press Space.
What happens It plays. Press it again to stop.
5. Fix the motion
It will look mechanical, and that is expected: linear interpolation moves at a constant speed, which nothing physical does.
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Select the keyframes at frame 20 and press F9.
What happens Easy Ease. The keys get bezier handles that slow the motion into its resting value. Animation ▸ Keyframe Assistant: Easy Ease is the same command.
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Press Shift + G for the graph editor.
What happens It replaces the track rows and fills the panel rather than sliding in as a strip — a curve needs height to be read in. The timeline is hidden, not unmounted, so its scroll position survives.
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In Value mode, drag a keyframe's handles.
What happens You are reshaping how the value travels between keys. Speed mode draws the derivative instead, and is read-only vertically on purpose — a Y position there is a speed, so dragging it would be ambiguous.
Do not look for a bounce easing preset
There isn't one, and anything named that elsewhere is really an ease-out-back. A cubic bezier is one curve with at most a single overshoot; a bounce is several of shrinking amplitude. Use the Bounce section in the Graph panel — it generates the keyframes, with gravity, elasticity and a bounce count.
6. Or skip all of it
Select the layer and open the Animate dropdown in the top bar. Rise Up does what you just built by hand, in one click — and what it writes is ordinary keyframes, so press U and retime them however you like.
| Catalogue | Count | What they are |
|---|---|---|
| Animation presets | 15 | Entrances, exits, loops, 3D moves |
| Text presets | 18 | Real per-character animators, not baked tracks |
| Behaviours | 6 | Ongoing motion rather than a one-shot |
| Scenery | 5 | Full-frame atmosphere |
| Looks | 25 | Effect stacks — grades, treatments, transitions |
Presets resolve in composition-relative units, so one authored at 1080p behaves correctly at 4K, square and vertical — a slide travels the same proportion of the frame rather than the same number of pixels.
Several layers, one movement
Apply the same preset to every layer, select them all, then Stagger Animations (0.3s) from the Animate dropdown. Keeping the ease identical and varying only the timing is what makes a group read as one movement. The offset follows selection order, so select from the one that should move first.
7. Add an effect
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With the layer selected, pick something from the Effect menu — Glow, Fast Box Blur, Brightness & Contrast.
What happens It lands on the layer's effect stack, and every numeric parameter on it is keyframeable like any other property.
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For the rest of the catalogue, use the Effects browser.
What happens 154 effects in ten folders: Blur & Sharpen, Color Correction, Stylize, Generate, Distort, Keying, Time, Transition, Perspective and Channel.
Order matters
Effects apply in stack order, and the Transform effect exists precisely so you can scale or rotate a layer after an effect rather than before — the difference between scaling a blur and blurring a scale.
8. Export
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File ▸ Export…
What happens The dialog renders real export frames — the same snapshot builder the encoder receives — and lets you scrub the whole range before anything is written. If a frame is empty, you find out now rather than after the encode.
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Pick a format, a resolution scale and a time range, then Export.
What happens Frames stream to a temporary directory one at a time and ffmpeg encodes in a separate process, so peak memory is one frame and the editor stays usable.
| Format | Use it when |
|---|---|
| MP4 — H.264 | Sharing. The default. Needs ffmpeg |
| WebM — VP9 | The web, and when you need a real alpha channel |
| MOV — ProRes 4444 | Handing off to another tool, with alpha. Large |
| GIF | A quick loop. No audio |
| PNG sequence | Archival, or another app's import. Audio rides along as a separate file |
| Lottie | Vector shapes and transform tracks, for web and mobile players |
Two exports of one project are identical
Frame time is the frame's index divided by the frame rate, never wall-clock, and the viewport and the exporter run the same render graph. So the file cannot disagree with the preview, and a re-render after a crash resumes identical work. A zero-frame encode is an error rather than a silently successful black video.
Where to go next
| If you want to… | Read |
|---|---|
| Understand what a keyframe actually is here | Concepts → Keyframes |
| Animate individual letters | Animation → Text animators |
| Push layers apart and add a camera | 3D & cameras → 3D layers |
| Rig flat artwork and pose it | Rigging → Bones & IK |
| Build something a colleague fills in | Projects → Templates |
Try it
Free and open source, and everything above is in the build you can download right now.