What is ae-motion-compiler?

ae-motion-compiler is a scripting framework for Adobe After Effects, aimed at motion designers and animators who want to automate repetitive parts of building an animation. Instead of hand placing keyframes on every layer, you define an animation pattern once and the framework applies it across many layers at once, generating keyframes, building expressions, and handling render output for you. The framework installs as a panel inside After Effects, reached through the File, Scripts menu once it is set up. Its main pieces include a keyframe generator for automatic timing, an expression builder for things like wiggle effects, a layer manager for batch operations across many layers at once, an easing curve editor, and a renderer manager for queuing up output jobs. It ships with a set of ready made animation templates, including sliding text, scaling, rotation, color transitions, shape morphing, staggered cascading effects, bounce, and wave patterns, which can be applied to layers through simple script calls rather than manual keyframing. Configuration is handled through a settings file covering default easing style, keyframe spacing, a batch size limit for layer operations, naming conventions, and render output format. Installation is done by cloning the project, installing its dependencies, building it, and running an install step that adds it into After Effects. It requires After Effects CC 2024 or newer, with at least 8GB of memory recommended and more for larger projects. The project is released under the MIT license and states it is an independent effort, not affiliated with or endorsed by Adobe. The README notes that script generated animations still need a person to review and refine them, since the quality of the result depends on how the templates and parameters are set up, and animation skill remains necessary to get good results.