New AE Plugins—Round 2

Joe Clay | 2026-05-07

We are finally back on track!

After our last post last year 👀, we ran into a few issues. After Effects has a lot of different things it does plugin-wise depending upon what type of layer you're working on, what size things are, etc. You can get a sense of that while working with it when you have to deal with comp space, layer space, raster, vector, etc. All of that has to be accounted for. Then you even have GPU vs CPU rendering, etc.

So the first thing we did was ditch the idea of CPU rendering. More and more, you can render on one machine in AE because of GPU plugins and the only edge case—that was pretty rare because of the hassle—is distributed rendering where you can only use CPU for whatever reason, so we decided to just stick with GPU rendering. A lot of the effects we're cooking up can be run in parallel on the GPU much faster.

Over the last year we've built a pipeline to build our After Effects plugins that we're calling Prometheus. So we're currently going back to our earlier alpha builds and rebuilding them to get them out to our beta testers to shake out as much as we can before we get them up here.

And unlike the last time when we thought we were in a good place and then ran into issues, this time we're ready to go. In fact, Better Ramp is the first plugin out of Prometheus and many more are in beta testing. We're excited to show you what else we have cooking, including some additional surprises from Prometheus but that'll have to wait just a little bit.