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Surehand MCP for Adobe® After Effects®

Surehand MCP lets an AI app work inside After Effects on your computer, and shows you what it did. It connects Claude (Desktop or Code), ChatGPT (desktop app or web), Codex, Cursor, VS Code (GitHub Copilot), Windsurf / Devin Desktop, LM Studio, or any other app that speaks MCP (the Model Context Protocol) to the After Effects you have open. Inside After Effects, the Surehand panel can also chat through Codex, Claude Code or Antigravity. Everything runs locally: the AI app talks to a small server on your machine, and that server talks to an extension inside After Effects.

AI app ──MCP──> surehand-ae server (Node.js) ──localhost──> Surehand extension in After Effects ──> ExtendScript

What it can do

• Run any After Effects script. The AI writes modern JavaScript; Surehand converts it for After Effects' ExtendScript engine and returns errors with the failing line.
• Use up to 114 ready-made tools for projects, comps, layers, keyframes (Graph Editor level), text, footage, effects, shapes, masks, 3D, audio, color settings, Essential Graphics and rendering. See What the AI can do.
• Tell you exactly what changed. Every edit returns a change list computed by After Effects itself, and every tool call is one undo step.
• See and measure its work: rendered frames, contact sheets over time, zoomed regions, difference images, exact layer bounds, pixel values.
• Prove that a structural change left the render unchanged, and un-precompose or deep-duplicate with every expression rewritten, applied only when the pixels match. See Proven edits and Precomp surgery.
• Compare versions of a project and explain an inherited project. See Project history and Project X-ray.
• Check a comp and its render against your delivery spec before you deliver. See Preflight.
• Push worst-case inputs through a template (long German, Arabic, CJK, huge numbers…) and measure what breaks, without touching your comp. See Stress test.
• Build checked versions: a version per CSV / JSON row, a version per language from your translators' files, a 9:16 or 1:1 by your rules, each one measured. See Versions, localization and reformat.
• Speed up and hand off renders: where render time goes, speed-ups kept only when proven identical, a package with a manifest of what the recipient needs, farm chunks proven complete. See Render speed, handoff and farms.
• Stay under your control: Full, Ask or Read-only mode, approvals in After Effects, Pause AI, an activity log of every call, and safety copies of the project. See The Surehand panel.
• Chat inside After Effects with Codex, Claude Code or Antigravity, on your own sign-in. See Chat in After Effects.
• Show results as views in the chat in apps that support them. See In-chat views.

Where to start

You want to…	Read
Install it	Installing
Connect your AI app	Connecting AI apps
Use ChatGPT in a browser	ChatGPT on the web
Understand the panel in After Effects	The Surehand panel
Approve each change before it runs	Approvals
Chat with the AI inside After Effects	Chat in After Effects
Check a delivery, or test a template with worst-case inputs	Preflight, Stress test
Update from 1.3	Upgrading
Fix a problem	Troubleshooting

First time? Read Installing, then Connecting AI apps, then ask your AI app: "Check After Effects is connected, then make a 1080p comp with an animated title and show me frame 1."

Supported versions

After Effects	Any language. After Effects 2025 (25.6) and 2026 (26.5) are tested release by release, on macOS and Windows. The extension loads in CC 2019 (16.0) and newer; versions before 2025 are best effort, and some checks need a newer After Effects and say so.
macOS	Apple silicon and Intel. The 1.4 .pkg installer needs macOS 13.5 or later; the zip installer uses the Node.js you have, or downloads Node.js 22.
Windows	Windows 10 or 11. The 1.4 Setup .exe needs 64-bit Windows 10 or later.
AI apps	Claude Desktop, Claude Code, ChatGPT desktop app, Codex, Cursor, VS Code (GitHub Copilot), Windsurf / Devin Desktop, LM Studio, ChatGPT on the web, and any MCP app that can start a local (stdio) server.

Several After Effects versions can run at the same time; the AI uses the one you used most recently and can switch. See FAQ.

Honest limits

• Surehand's permissions are safeguards against mistakes, not a sandbox. See Security.
• Proofs compare sampled frames, not every frame. See Proven edits.
• Preflight's flash check is a pre-check, not a certified PSE / Harding test. See Preflight.
• Precomp surgery refuses what it can't reproduce exactly, and its proof covers the sampled frames. See Precomp surgery.
• The stress test measures the inputs it tries, at the chosen frames. See Stress test.
• It doesn't generate images and ships no presets or canned looks: it works on your project, by your rules.

Website: conformlabs.co/get. Source code, releases and issues: github.com/ConformLabs/surehand-mcp.