Show HN: I created an After Effects alternative

This is from my point of view as an experienced developer and VFX artist, including in-depth knowledge of AE.

    A 30fps limit is surprising
    23.976 as an fps does not seem to be dealt with gracefully
    Clicking report bug should take me to a bug report form with info
    Interacting with "rectangle" is surprising because the corners aren't draggable. Probably should default to full size
    I should be able to wind input fields by clicking and dragging on them, such as for rotation
    When I drag keys around in the dope sheet, and let go with momentum, they appear to keep moving and "settle" in a sort of random place. They should not do that
    I see that this momentum behavior is also in the play head in the timeline. It really should not do that.
    Putting in a value in the dope sheet should be enabled, and it should automatically set a key
    I liked the visualizations of the easing, but it should probably be communicated with the keyframe's icon shape in the dope sheet like it does in AE.
    It is difficult to move a key to the beginning of the timeline.
    Architecturally, the preview rendering probably has to work the way it does in After Effects. Guaranteeing a real time visualization is pretty important.

I kind of stopped there because it's a bunch of goal-less fiddling. This is really great, there is a tremendous amount of product development. Hopefully you will think deeply about your audience and objectives, and the amount of product development that goes into After Effects.

As a developer it's rare to see something which leaves me feeling "how would you even build something like that..." but this is one of those. Huge cudos for even attempting and following through with something like this!

This is excellent!

Several years ago I built a prototype of a video renderer on nodejs (v0.8-ish). It's a silly thing to do, rendering video in javascript (especially a decade ago), but it worked well enough to prove that it could be done and a startup pivot was born - one that was eventually acquired by Vimeo.

While a colleague (and now friend) was working on porting my silly little renderer to C/C++ to try to get closer to real-time, I built out a UI to allow us to "templatize" dynamic video for our users. This made it possible for our designers to design the video experience for the videos that were dynamically generated for our users' content.

That UI very much resembled Flash. Since then I've always wanted to do what you've done here. Before acquisition, I was asking our designers to walk me through how they use After Effects, in the hopes of building our tools in that direction, but then Vimeo showed up and... not too long after I left to start a travel startup. I haven't revisited the video space since.

I love this. I _knew_ that it could be done - especially now that WASM is stable - and I'm excited to see someone has done it. And free, no less!

Edit: Thought it was open source - thanks for the correction. Also I was way off on the node version.

Wow! This is wildly impressive and deeply inspiring - a truly incredible achievement. Even more unbelievable that it's by a solo dev. Please keep up the amazing work on this project. AE is powerful and feature rich but also bloated with decades of legacy code and niche professional use cases to support, so there's a huge need for what you've built. Not everyone is a high-end animator or special effects compositor. Many of us just want to make cool motion graphics for personal videos, social media and art projects.

Based on the great response you've gotten so far, I'd suggest focusing on ways for the community to expand on what you've built with templates and plug-ins.

I really hope you charge money for it and make it awesome, it's about time Adobe gets disrupted and this is a wonderful idea!

It will take significant resources, cash and teams to make this into a serious contender, and folks that have problems to solve will always be happy to pay decent dollars for great software.

This is amazing. I just installed AE yesterday after I decided that I needed to add "motion graphics creator" to my skillset in order to make decent Instagram stories.

What's needed now is a page where people can share the templates they've created.

Can you please clarify, which exactly key features are missing from Firefox that make this app say 'use Chrome or Edge'?

Very cool! Although other more complex open source solutions exist, for me the sweet spot between capable and not overwhelming is perfect. I prefer Photopea over Photoshop for that same reason (..just don't go crazy on the anti-adblocker like Photopea did)

I thought this is using AI so I was gonna dismiss it. But then saw the No AI sign and immediately signed up. Seriously though why is "No AI" a "feature" worth mentioning on top?

Having never used after effects, I would like to say that photopea has probably been my favorite piece of software in the last 10 years.

I diligently disable Adblock on that website and have donated a few times in the past to support them.

I hope to see many more alternatives on the market, and lend my support to anyone building!

Site and brand looks amazing and it's like something that really can compete with AE. Best of the lucks and I hope you will make it open source some day and make it work on Firefox :D

but I think each browser tab has a memory limit of 4gb? this means a web based video editor can only work on short clips?

looks impressive!

What are your plans for further development? I guess for this complex project to evolve in order to meet the needs of the professional users it will require lots of work/team/resources/etc.

Do you plan to monetize it somehow in the future? or how are you going to sustain it?

Another free alternative to AE (targeted at more casual users) that comes to mind is CapCut... which is obviously a ByteDance product. And they already offer tons of features for free, so the competition could be tough...

Side comment:

Comparing a web-based software that runs on your own computer vs. installing a (say native) software and frequently updating, isn't it interesting that the former is faster to do? When using a web-based software to ru on your own machine, you are effectively, momentarily, installing it and are able to uninstall by clearing the cache.

Wonderful. You just "created" this?! This seems like it took many years and lots of hours. Great work!

Where did you get the time to do this as a hobby? I spend evenings and weekends working on a project for the last 6 months and it's only half as good. 10x developer maybe, small team, millionaire? xD

Can I export projects to use in other places? Or import projects from other places? Blender comes to mind.

But also, I would like to use motion graphics in an app where the software engineers don't have to re-implement each asset in code.

Is there an option for custom ease curves, like a graph editor? I love the idea of an After Effects alternative, but if it only has a few simple ease functions to choose from I can't see myself using it much, sadly.

Dang, the level of feature depth you've achieved here is amazing, and the UX is great if you have some experience with other video editors. This is definitely workable, at least for smaller projects.

I was well on my way to create a software like this [1], it started out as a flash clone, but since I didn't define any scope it started to look like after effects, on the back end I mean, never actually wrote a single line of code for the UI.

Are you planning on creating a company out of this? Are you going to monetize it?

1 - https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3pnEx5_eGm9BbCp2ZTj6LT...

Wow looks cool. Now if only it could be used in Firefox. And yeah I know it doesn't have some chrome-only things. But afaik that's mostly because google/chrome does what ever they want, and there is no such thing as standards anymore apparently.

First of all, this is really really cool! Great job!

Would you consider building in support for color spaces into the software? It looks like the working color space is linear sRGB, but it'd be nice to at least know, and also support other color spaces as well.

Frequently, when I'm rendering from blender, the raw renders will have out-of-gamut colors, which I'll then correct and bring back into sRGB when compositing.

Omg I've tried this it's really amazing. I see how many thing you did here, how many hours did u spend to build that?

As a motion designer, I'm curious what features does this has that AE doesn't.

How long did this take to build? I know I read below that you used ChatGPT, which is great. We're going to see more amazing work across the board because of ChatGPT and tools like it.

Very impressive, and very needed. Current open source video editors uniformly suck.

Glad to see browser technology being put to use. Browser is by far the best API for desktop applications too, despite the very common ignorant complaints on HN.

Kudos!

Great app, but I wish it was available as a desktop app, similar to Natron, rather than just online. Some people may not have the capability to access the app online.

Any reason you couldn't bundle this into an Electron application?

It's cool, and free. But what happens when you get bored and take the site down ?

This is truly incredible. I want to remind everyone about Blender's humble beginnings. Great work, I look forward to seeing your product pop back up as others discover it.

congrats op, would you mind sharing the techstack used in creating this

Few realize that for many AE is the real jewel in the Adobe crown, Photoshop and Illustrator and Premier all have viable alternatives. AE however stands alone as the only tool with it's unique feature set.

Yeah other compositing tools exist but they lack the animation/mograph tools of AE, or animation tools exist but lack the scripting/filters/compositing.

NoAI will be the new "no sugar" buzz

Pikimov sounds like some russian guy's name. An odd name for a project.

This is amazing! I have not been able to find a good free AE alternative yet and this looks quite promising!

Je suis franchement impressionné when I see a single person accomplishing that type of tremendous work!

Keep up the good work

Great idea and the product looks great. I looked everywhere for a suitable substitute for AE and there was none.

What would it take to support AE plugins? Nail that and you have something to make Adobe nervous.

Looks like it's Chromium-only for now. Not for Firefox and Safari enjoyers.

Congrats OP! I don't have Chrome to test, but this is really nice from what I can see.

this is awesome. I hope some video editor comes up that can compete with Premiere. Then with pikimov and photopea, I could totally ditch Adobe for one. Have you considered open sourcing the app to benefit from contributors and build a community?

Nice, but too many animations/chaos on the landing page for my taste. Keep it simple.

This is great, I'm not a frequent video editor but I can see myself using it.

Looks very good! Will give it a try whenever I need a quick video edit on the fly.

This is incredibly impressive! Both the UI and the feature set are fantastic.

Wow, this looks really amazing! Must've been a lot of work.

What's that little blue bird icon in the top right corner? Seems to go to X, but I'm not sure why.

...jk!

On a serious note, this is REALLY cool. Great job.

Tiny feedback, your console is extremely chatty. I get this is a beta, but it still might be worth disabling that logging for production deploys.

I hope to see this evolve into a commercial product I really think it fills a need and it seems to work incredibly well.

This is incredible work! Is a desktop version planned?

Would anyone use a macOS native animation editor?

on another note if anyone is searching for an AE alternative for motion design I highly recommend Cavalry by Scenegroup

used it and its freaking brilliant. please keep improving it. i want to go away from adobe cursed products

You're crazy. This is really cool.

Doesn‘t seem to work in Safari?

This seems like an awesome project, but for the love of God, why did you use JavaScript when you are obviously capable of making it in a decently performant low-level language like C or Rust? Browser apps have such terrible performance; I just don't understand your choice of framework.

Just curious - why not open source?

(really cool btw, super impressive)

Side note: I just wanted to comment on the variance of HN submission popularity. OP submitted this same amazing tool as a "Show HN" 20 days ago, with very similar title and shorter description [0]. It got no votes.

Today this submission is climbing rapidly. Was the tool very different 20 days ago? I honestly don't know! But you never know how submissions will perform here. It feels pretty random, which makes sense, and also is part of the fun of HN.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40645009

This is a very nice project and any competition to After Effects is very welcome.

One model I'd love to see is a web based front end, but all video processing happens in the backend.

Then ship the app as a combined front/backend, or just the front end that connects to a remote backend. That backend could be a server in a studio with beefed up specs, or offloaded to the cloud for solo animators working on complex projects.

Seeing a project like this give me hope that we could decouple what the app does, vs how to control the app.

I feel like that web only is a positive way forward. If only it was possible to prove nothing goes back to the server I think it would gain a lot more trust.

Though companies who want to see your data might not be so keen.

On my phone, but will try it out when I get home.

Funny how "No AI" has become an feature. As someone how doesn't know anything about motion design, this looks great!

Looks fantastic, and the comment about Photopea. Photopea is such a gem, and can't wait for their Vectorpea to launch as it's got me out of trouble so many times when I don't need an Adobe license for opening a file once a month or so (I just wish Photopea was OpenSource)

It says "Privacy respected" but there are Google Ads and Analytics included.

So… What are the features vital that only available in Chrome?