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Releases: isroil01/premation
Release list
1.0.2
Premation 1.0.2 — the first Linux release.
- Linux. Premation now ships for Linux as an x64 AppImage beside the
Windows installer and the macOS dmgs, with the same engine, bundled ffmpeg
and fonts, and in-place updates. Mark the file executable and run it; it
needs FUSE 2 (libfuse2) and a Vulkan-capable GPU driver. - Panels. One tab strip and one field grammar across the panels, a
calmer timeline and tool row. - Text. Tracking in 1/1000 em per range, the alignment anchor on the
first baseline, vertical columns anchored at the top; real italics of
system families and synthesized small caps; the Character panel scrubs
Size, Leading and Tracking in After Effects units and has a Style menu and
an Anchor row. Assistants can set justification, the italic face, tracking
and the anchor. - Camera. Crane, dolly and orbit rigs, Follow Path, Fly to Selected
Layers, shake, orient along path, depth compositing, linked flare, photo to
3D, camera import/export, camera expressions and a stereo rig; a New Camera
dialog that asks what you are doing, one lens list in mm, a Shot header and
a simpler Depth of Field. - Cache. A RAM tier and an After Effects-style native disk cache with
honest per-scope bars; the 3D blink is gone. - Export. Everything renders locally; window-only footage is staged, not
refused. - Assistants. The AI reaches the engine's 3D (primitives, PBR and glass,
extrusion, typed lights, shadows, environment), proposes three concepts per
brief and remembers recent pieces;premation://connectionsopens the
assistant Connections.
Downloads
| Platform | File |
|---|---|
| Windows x64 | Premation-Setup-Windows.exe |
| macOS Apple silicon | Premation-macOS-arm64.dmg |
| macOS Intel | Premation-macOS-x64.dmg |
| Linux x64 | Premation-Linux-x86_64.AppImage |
The plugin SDK zips (premation-sdk-*) are for plugin authors.
Before you install
Windows: this build is not signed. SmartScreen will show "Windows protected your PC" — choose More info > Run anyway.
macOS: this build is not signed or notarized. macOS will refuse to open it on first launch. Go to System Settings > Privacy & Security, find the blocked app, and choose Open Anyway. Control-clicking the app does NOT work on macOS Sequoia or later.
Linux: download the AppImage, mark it executable (
chmod +x Premation-Linux-x86_64.AppImageor Properties ▸ Permissions) and run it. It needs FUSE 2 (libfuse2on Debian/Ubuntu) and a Vulkan-capable GPU driver. Updates install in place. This is the first Linux build and it has been verified by CI, not yet by a person — please report anything odd.
1.0.1
0.9.0
0.8.5
Open an After Effects project, and a plugin publishing screen that is no longer a pop-up.
After Effects projects open directly
File ▸ Open now takes .aep and .aepx: compositions, layers and their parenting, transforms with their keyframes and easing, masks, text with its font and tracking, and effects matched by name.
Footage is relinked by filename where it can be found and clearly listed where it cannot, so a project with missing media still opens and tells you exactly what to point at. The import report says what came across and what did not — nothing is silently dropped.
Publishing a plugin has a real workspace
It used to be a single modal with the namespace claim, every listing and the upload form stacked inside it. It is now a proper screen: your listings down one side, the one you are editing beside them with its own tabs for details, media, guide and changelog, a save bar that appears only when something is unsaved, and a withdraw dialog that offers "make it private instead" rather than making removal the only exit.
Your signing key still never touches the app — the system file prompt hands it straight to the signer.
The cloud dashboard reads like a tool
The clearest fix: the row you had selected was the hardest one to read. Selected items in the sidebar sat at 2.80:1 contrast against 7.36:1 for everything else, so the page you were on was the one you could not see. Selection now reads at 4.73:1 and is pinned by a test in all three themes.
Alongside that — the format filter is a segmented control instead of an operating-system dropdown that ignored the dark theme; the search field stopped resizing itself and shoving the control beside it; render rows show progress only while something is actually rendering, and show the failure reason inline when it is not; and the empty Assets and Trash screens offer the action instead of describing the buttons above them.
Timeline editing in bulk
Select a range of clips, drag a whole group as one bar, stagger a selection (including a zigzag), zoom anchored to the pointer rather than the playhead, and nudge by less than a frame.
Two small asks
Once your email is confirmed the app asks, once, how you found it — and once you have made something it asks how it is going. Both are remembered on your account, so declining is honoured on every machine you sign in on rather than coming back after a reinstall.
Installing
This build is not code-signed on either platform. Both operating systems will warn you; neither warning means the build is unsafe, only that it is unsigned.
macOS: this build is not signed or notarized. macOS will refuse to open it on first launch. Go to System Settings ▸ Privacy & Security, find the blocked app, and choose Open Anyway. Control-clicking the app does NOT work on macOS Sequoia or later.
Windows: this build is not signed. SmartScreen will show "Windows protected your PC" — choose More info ▸ Run anyway.
Full changelog: https://github.com/isroil01/premation/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md
v0.8.4
Twixtor-style speed ramping, a cleaner sidebar and Properties panel, native plugins, and a sturdier render engine.
- Speed ramps and velocity edits: every video and comp layer now has a Speed section with three modes — Normal, Speed % (key speeds on a graph, Twixtor-style), and Frames (map output time to source frame numbers). Drag points on a log-scale speed graph, pick Smooth/Linear/Instant ramps, start from 7 presets, and see exactly where the footage runs out with one-click Fit to footage. Smooth motion blends slow-mo frames, and audio follows the same curve. Made for TikTok-style edits.
- Slow motion actually blends now: retimed source time was being rounded to whole frames, so frame blending never kicked in on real clips.
- Sidebar and Properties redesign: fewer, labelled panels on each side, and Properties is one scroll with compact paired rows — Effects and Text live inside it instead of separate tabs.
- Native-looking window chrome: a unified toolbar on macOS and a slim title bar with system caption buttons on Windows and Linux.
- Plugins: a native plugin tier with its own crash-isolated host and SDK, local plugin loading, and plugin crashes reported in the plugin's own log.
- Engine robustness: recovery from a lost GPU context, one failing render pass no longer takes down the frame, lighter undo/autosave snapshots, background effect baking, and streamed ffmpeg export.
- Stroke, pen and paint closer to After Effects: paint on footage, pen paths that close properly, richer taper/dash/gradient strokes.
- 3D: styled 3D text keeps real mesh bodies with a styled front face, keyframeable Geometry Options, and a batch of light, camera and glTF fixes.
0.8.3
Text that reads like After Effects set it, and a batch of shape and render fixes.
- Real multilingual text: full right-to-left and bidirectional layout (Arabic, Hebrew — mixed with Latin in one line), vertical writing with tate-chū-yoko and kinsoku line-breaking for CJK, and true optical kerning. Source-text expressions can now drive what a text layer says.
- Time Stretch on any layer, not just footage.
- Rounded rectangles stay rounded everywhere geometry is rebuilt: under any path operator (Trim, Zig-Zag, Repeater…), through Merge Paths booleans and the path cloner, and under the Knife — all of which used to square the corners off. Scaled layers keep circular corners, and animated radii are honoured throughout.
- Projected shadows no longer paint over the layer casting them, and the lamp's wash survives alongside its shadow.
- Properties panel no longer loops: since 0.8.1 the panel re-rendered itself endlessly while it was open, wasting CPU the whole time. Its rows in the inspector's ⋯ menu now also stay put instead of only appearing because of that loop.
- Object Matte installs reliably: the custom model install pairs the encoder/decoder downloads through the app itself (no more copy-pasting two URLs into the right folders), with resumable, verified downloads.
0.8.2
Premation 0.8.2
Sound, brought up to the level of the rest of the app. The audio engine was already strong — multi-voice playback, varispeed, silence removal, ducking, beat detection — but almost none of it had a front door. This release builds the front door, and closes the gap to After Effects 26.3 on audio.
An Audio panel that actually mixes
- Ctrl+4 opens a real mixer: a VU meter with clipping indicators and peak hold, and two faders that change the selected layer's level and pan — not just another meter to look at.
- Units in decibels or percent, and an adjustable slider minimum.
Levels and pan you can keyframe
- An audio layer's Level now has a stopwatch in the inspector, like every other property. Layers made before this keep the exact loudness they had.
- Pan is new, per layer, and keyframeable — panning used to mean applying the Stereo Mixer effect.
- Fade In and Fade Out, one click each, written as ordinary keyframes you can reshape afterwards. They leave an existing duck alone.
Four new audio effects
Matching After Effects 26.3:
- Compressor — threshold, ratio, knee, attack, release, makeup gain and an output limiter.
- Distortion — six characters (soft clip, hard clip, two saturations, tube, fuzz) plus a bitcrusher.
- De-esser — tames harsh "s" sounds, with a Sibilance Only mode for finding the right frequency.
- Noise Gate — pulls a layer down wherever it is quieter than a threshold: room tone between phrases, hiss under a take.
Existing effects got deeper too: Parametric EQ now has three bands, Tone plays five notes and white noise, Flange & Chorus has real multiple voices, Reverb gained Diffusion and Brightness, and Modulator separates vibrato from tremolo.
Audio visualizers that can follow a path
- Audio Spectrum and Audio Waveform can run along a mask path or around a circle — the spectrum ring around a logo is finally possible.
- Both also gained side options, softness, hue interpolation and an adjustable analysis window; the Waveform adds Displayed Samples and Mono/Left/Right.
- The Audio Waveform effect had never drawn anything at all. It does now.
Working with sound in the timeline
- A speaker switch on every layer, beside the eye. Alt-click a solo switch to solo just that layer.
Lshows a layer's audio levels;LLshows its waveform, on the same time axis as the keyframes above it. (Lpreviously did nothing.)- Audio-only preview: Numpad . plays the sound from the playhead in real time without drawing the picture, so a long composition auditions at true speed. Numpad * drops a marker while it plays — tap along to the music.
- Preferences ▸ Audio: choose which device previews play through, and trade latency for stability on a busy machine.
Also in this release
Composition navigation and Pre-compose, the Layer viewer, the mini-flowchart, and fixes to mask keyframe timing, motion-blur frame rounding and projected shadows.
Full list in CHANGELOG.md.
Installing
Windows: this build is not signed. SmartScreen will show "Windows protected your PC" — choose More info > Run anyway.
macOS: this build is not signed or notarized. macOS will refuse to open it on first launch. Go to System Settings > Privacy & Security, find the blocked app, and choose Open Anyway. Control-clicking the app does NOT work on macOS Sequoia or later.
0.8.1
Premation 0.8.1
A big one for 3D: lights, cameras and effects now behave the way you'd expect from After Effects — plus Deep Glow, Energy Beam, Particles v2 and Plexus.
3D lighting that behaves
- Adding a light no longer shows a phantom second light. The automatic Ambient Fill is now an even lift across the frame, and its icon only appears while it's selected.
- New 3D layers respond to lights and shadows straight away.
- A light sitting between two layers no longer breaks shadow-map shadows; unticking Cast Shadows turns the shadow map off too; 3D solids cast shadows in both shadow modes.
Cameras you can direct
- Camera Options and Light Options in the timeline — Zoom, orbit, point of interest, depth of field, intensity, cone and shadow dials, all keyframeable from there.
- Look through any camera: the View menu and every 2-up / 4-up pane list each camera by name.
- Layer ▸ Camera ▸ Distribute Layers in Z spreads your layers in depth for instant parallax, without changing the framing.
- A Camera preset folder: Push In, Pull Out, Orbit Sweep, Drift Parallax, Dolly Zoom and Handheld.
- Layer ▸ New ▸ Camera… / Light… open their option dialogs (
Ctrl+Alt+Shift+C/L), and new cameras and lights are numbered.
Effects on 3D layers
- Glows, blurs, beams, light rays and lens flares are no longer clipped at a 3D layer's edge.
- Levels, Curves, Posterize, Exposure, Lumetri and the colour effects now reach extruded shapes, 3D primitives and imported glTF models — gradient-filled extrusion walls included.
- Nested comps in 3D: a composition placed as a layer renders its 3D through its own camera and lights — real depth, lighting and shadows.
New effects and tools
- Deep Glow — a physically based glow with a tight core and a long tail.
- Energy Beam — a Saber-style beam along a mask path, a text outline or a line, with twenty presets (Lightsaber, Neon, Electric Arc, Plasma…). Lightning can follow a mask path too.
- Particles v2 (sphere emitters, drag, ramps, sub-emission, streaks, sprite sheets) and Plexus point-and-line networks.
- Height displacement, a second shadow-mapped light, and Cryptomatte ID mattes from EXR.
- Tracking & masks: Write-on and Vegas follow a (tracked) mask path, draw around an object to get a mask, and the Object Matte model now ships with the app.
- Motion blur is sized by how far the whole silhouette moves, so spins and flips no longer strobe.
- Paste SVG straight from Illustrator; the render queue resumes after a relaunch; 18 more After Effects effects and 20 more effect presets.
Full list in CHANGELOG.md.
Refreshed interface
- New styling for buttons, inputs, sliders, switches, tabs and accordions.
- Properties panel: property search, header actions, a 3×3 anchor-snap grid and presets on Transform and Appearance. Effects now live in the Effect Controls panel.
- Assets panel toolbar: New Folder, add to composition or at the playhead, Interpret Footage, New Composition from Footage.
- Toolbars scroll sideways when a panel is narrow.
Installing
Windows: this build is not signed. SmartScreen will show "Windows protected your PC" — choose More info > Run anyway.
macOS: this build is not signed or notarized. macOS will refuse to open it on first launch. Go to System Settings > Privacy & Security, find the blocked app, and choose Open Anyway. Control-clicking the app does NOT work on macOS Sequoia or later.
0.8.0
Premation 0.8.0
A big one for 3D: lights, cameras and effects now behave the way you'd expect from After Effects — plus Deep Glow, Energy Beam, Particles v2 and Plexus.
3D lighting that behaves
- Adding a light no longer shows a phantom second light. The automatic Ambient Fill is now an even lift across the frame, and its icon only appears while it's selected.
- New 3D layers respond to lights and shadows straight away.
- A light sitting between two layers no longer breaks shadow-map shadows; unticking Cast Shadows turns the shadow map off too; 3D solids cast shadows in both shadow modes.
Cameras you can direct
- Camera Options and Light Options in the timeline — Zoom, orbit, point of interest, depth of field, intensity, cone and shadow dials, all keyframeable from there.
- Look through any camera: the View menu and every 2-up / 4-up pane list each camera by name.
- Layer ▸ Camera ▸ Distribute Layers in Z spreads your layers in depth for instant parallax, without changing the framing.
- A Camera preset folder: Push In, Pull Out, Orbit Sweep, Drift Parallax, Dolly Zoom and Handheld.
- Layer ▸ New ▸ Camera… / Light… open their option dialogs (
Ctrl+Alt+Shift+C/L), and new cameras and lights are numbered.
Effects on 3D layers
- Glows, blurs, beams, light rays and lens flares are no longer clipped at a 3D layer's edge.
- Levels, Curves, Posterize, Exposure, Lumetri and the colour effects now reach extruded shapes, 3D primitives and imported glTF models — gradient-filled extrusion walls included.
- Nested comps in 3D: a composition placed as a layer renders its 3D through its own camera and lights — real depth, lighting and shadows.
New effects and tools
- Deep Glow — a physically based glow with a tight core and a long tail.
- Energy Beam — a Saber-style beam along a mask path, a text outline or a line, with twenty presets (Lightsaber, Neon, Electric Arc, Plasma…). Lightning can follow a mask path too.
- Particles v2 (sphere emitters, drag, ramps, sub-emission, streaks, sprite sheets) and Plexus point-and-line networks.
- Height displacement, a second shadow-mapped light, and Cryptomatte ID mattes from EXR.
- Tracking & masks: Write-on and Vegas follow a (tracked) mask path, draw around an object to get a mask, and the Object Matte model now ships with the app.
- Motion blur is sized by how far the whole silhouette moves, so spins and flips no longer strobe.
- Paste SVG straight from Illustrator; the render queue resumes after a relaunch; 18 more After Effects effects and 20 more effect presets.
Full list in CHANGELOG.md.
Installing
Windows: this build is not signed. SmartScreen will show "Windows protected your PC" — choose More info > Run anyway.
macOS: this build is not signed or notarized. macOS will refuse to open it on first launch. Go to System Settings > Privacy & Security, find the blocked app, and choose Open Anyway. Control-clicking the app does NOT work on macOS Sequoia or later.
0.7.0
- Effects run on the GPU: 177 of 183 effects now render as shaders — every
keyer, distortion, transition, blur, noise, stylize, interior layer style,
particle generator and the auto colour corrections. Video with effects or
motion tracks plays at full speed instead of dropping to a per-frame CPU
bake, and a "cpu fx" row in the viewport HUD shows the six that still bake
(Vegas, Numbers, Timecode, Audio Spectrum, Audio Waveform, Lightning).
Noise- and particle-based effects keep their controls and density but land
in a different random arrangement than before. - Camera verbs (Layer ▸ Camera): Create Orbit Null, Set / Link Focus
Distance to a layer or to the point of interest, and Look at Selected / All
under View ▸ Viewport ▸ 3D View. New lights bring an Ambient Fill so the
unlit side of a 3D object is no longer black. - Layer ▸ Time: reverse, freeze frame, time-remap enable, and stretch
commands on the selected layers. - Smoother 3D handling: dragging a 3D object, camera or light no longer
shows the gizmo moving ahead of the object; the 3D Rotation and Orientation
rows all edit their values. - Puppet: tighter outline meshes on character cut-outs, bend pins that keep
a rigid core and let the mesh solve the transition, and pins placed on a
posed character land where you clicked. - Bug batch: tracker overlay no longer reads as broken video, Character
panel typography (case, small caps, super/subscript, scale, baseline,
stroke) renders, one-sided keyframe navigators on every property row,
Library duplicates removed, Media Browser file picking, channel views
(R / G / B / Alpha) and the frame cache now agree, Lottie trim paths and
animated SVG first frames import correctly, Preview panel controls work. - UX batch (from
docs/UX_UI_IMPROVEMENT_PLAN.md): design tokens with a
density tier and high-contrast theme, native menus generated from one model,
a docked Export panel, progress toasts with a job tray, mixed-value
multi-select editing in the inspector, camera bookmarks, snapshot / wipe
compare, timeline auto-follow, markers, lift / extract / ripple, and a
faster playhead clock.
Installers below: Windows .exe and macOS .dmg. Installed apps pick this version up automatically once published.