v0.3.0

The first release where the tools were checked against a real After Effects
session rather than only reviewed as code. Three new tools, twelve fixed
problems, and a fair amount of guidance rewritten because measuring it showed
the old advice pointed the wrong way.

Install

Claude Desktop — download after-effects-mcp-0.3.0.mcpb below and open it. Nothing else to install.

Any other MCP client — either npx -y @engine-room/after-effects-mcp if you have Node 22+, or download the
standalone build for your machine below and point your client at the executable inside it.

Then open After Effects and ask your assistant to set up After Effects.

New

Bring footage in. import_footage and create_footage_layer handle video,
images, audio, PSD and AI files. The import checks what After Effects actually
produced rather than trusting it: an SVG whose viewBox asks for one shape and
imports at another is a real After Effects bug that renders as nothing at all,
with no error and no warning. Those are now refused with an explanation instead
of quietly costing you an afternoon.

Send a template to Premiere. export_mogrt writes a Motion Graphics
template. It suppresses the modal dialogs that would otherwise sit there waiting
for a click — a comp using a non-Adobe font used to simply hang — and it can take
the thumbnail from any frame you name, instead of the first one, which is usually
black on anything that fades up.

Ask for less. The reading tools can now return part of a layer instead of all
of it. This matters more than it sounds: everything your assistant reads stays in
its memory for the rest of the session, so one enormous read makes it slower and
more forgetful for everything that follows. A shape rig that used to come back as
15,259 characters can now come back as 739. Anything left out is named and
counted, so a short answer never passes for a complete one.

Fixed

• Text alignment no longer drifts. Asking for left-aligned text used to
  measure the words and bake the offset in. Retype the text, or edit it in
  Premiere, and the layout jumped. It now sets real justification, so it stays
  correct however the text changes later.
• Text no longer inherits your Character panel. A layer created with no
  styling picked up whatever tracking that panel was last left on — the same
  request rendered differently on two machines. Tracking is now set explicitly.
• Screenshots can no longer lie to you. After Effects sometimes hands back a
  frame it rendered earlier — a different comp, at a different time, and it looks
  perfectly valid. Your assistant would then describe a picture of the wrong
  thing with complete confidence. Those are now caught and refused. (This one
  fired repeatedly during testing; it is not rare.)
• Screenshots of 16-bit projects work. They were being produced in a format
  many readers reject outright.
• Large comps screenshot sensibly by default, rendering smaller rather than
  full size unless you ask otherwise.
• The project list reports what things actually are. Every item in a project
  was labelled "folder" — comps, footage, solids, all of it — for two releases.
• Copying rigged layers between comps works. Anything with a parent or a
  linked expression refused to copy.
• Scripts return their whole answer. Results containing lists or nested data
  came back empty, which looks exactly like a script that did nothing — inviting
  a re-run of something that had already made its changes.
• Shape layers build in the order you'd expect, and the tools now say plainly
  that the first shape added sits on top, which is the opposite of the layer
  stack and had been silently producing solid slabs.
• A busy After Effects is no longer reported as a dead one. They have
  opposite remedies, and "restart After Effects" told to someone whose script is
  still running throws away their work for nothing.
• The panel starts. On some setups it silently never came up.
• Upgrades stop asking you to restart for nothing. The check that decides
  whether After Effects is running current code was comparing when it was
  built rather than what it contains.

Known gap

Calls can still hang while you are on another macOS desktop and recover when you
switch back. It is real but not yet understood, and the suspected fix could not
be validated — so nothing was changed on a guess. The experiment that would
settle it ships in the repo. Tracked as
#25.

Two other things worth saying plainly: Windows is built and tested on every
change, but no test machine has After Effects on it, so the Windows panel install
is the least-proven part of this. And the macOS builds are signed and notarized;
the Windows one is not, so SmartScreen may warn on first run.

Keep each downloaded folder together — the After Effects panel ships alongside
the executable.

Full changelog: v0.2.1...v0.3.0