After Effects MCP

Let Claude and other AI agents work in Adobe After Effects: build comps, animate with keyframes and expressions, lay out and warp type, look at frames, and render, all through the Model Context Protocol. It ships with skills that turn a short brief into a finished, sound-designed video.

What's in the box

The MCP server

• 115+ commands: compositions, layers, shapes, text, masks, effects, cameras, keyframes, expressions, markers, rendering, plus procedural and layout tools.

• Results come straight back. Each command runs over a local socket and returns its result in the same call; render-frame returns a frame as an image the agent can look at.

• Many agent sessions, one After Effects. The first server becomes a hub and the others route through it; if it closes, another takes over.

• Renders that don't freeze AE. Full renders run in a separate process with aerender.

• Safe timeouts. A command that can't reach AE in time (a dialog is open, a render is running) is dropped and never runs later by surprise.

The skills (skills/): Claude Code skills that make finished videos with the server.

Related MCP server: aftr

Quick start

You need After Effects 2022 or later (developed on 2026, macOS), Node.js 18+, and an MCP client such as Claude Code or Claude Desktop.

1. Install the server and the After Effects panel

On macOS double-click Install AE MCP (Mac).command, on Windows Install AE MCP (Windows).bat. It builds the server, copies the bridge panel into After Effects (asking for your admin password if needed) and registers the server as after-effects in Claude Desktop. Or by hand:

git clone https://github.com/pouulll/after-effects-mcp-extended.git
cd after-effects-mcp-extended
npm install              # also builds
npm run install-bridge   # copies the panel into After Effects

and register it with your client, for example in Claude Code:

claude mcp add after-effects -- node "$PWD/build/index.js"

2. Open the panel in After Effects

Enable Settings → Scripting & Expressions → Allow Scripts to Write Files and Access Network (Windows: Edit → Preferences), restart After Effects, and open Window → mcp-bridge-auto.jsx. It should read Connected to MCP server (port 8790).

3. Install the skills (optional)

cp -R skills/ae-* ~/.claude/skills/

Then ask your agent something like "Make a 12-second engaging explainer for my app", or just "run bridge-status" to check the connection.

How it works

 Claude session A ── MCP server (hub) ◄──────── TCP 127.0.0.1:8790 ──────── After Effects
 Claude session B ── MCP server (follower) ──┘                              (bridge panel)

After Effects doesn't let scripts listen on sockets, so the bridge panel inside AE connects out to the MCP server and polls it for work every 40–120 ms. Every agent session starts its own copy of the server; the first becomes the hub (it owns the panel connection and a single command queue), later ones become followers that forward their calls through it, and if the hub's session closes a follower takes over within about a second. Every command carries a deadline, so nothing runs late after its caller has given up.

Tools

run-script { script: "createTextLayer", parameters: { compName: "Intro", text: "Hello", fontSize: 96 } }

Command highlights

The full reference is in CAPABILITIES.md. Every command that changes the project is one undo step in After Effects.

Text layout

These commands measure what is actually on screen, so parenting, scale and rotation are handled.

• layoutTextStack sizes a title, subtitle and body on a modular type scale, stacks them with consistent gaps and scales the whole block to fit the area (title-safe by default).

• fitTextToBox finds the font size at which text fits a box, the comp or another layer, then aligns it inside.

• alignLayers, distributeLayers and setAnchorPoint work like AE's Align panel, plus safe areas, boxes and target layers.

• warpText applies Photoshop-style warps (arc, bulge, flag, wave, rise, …). It first wraps the text in a precomp sized to the text, because AE's warp effects otherwise bend the whole comp-sized text layer and skew the type. The text stays editable.

• textOnPath puts text on an arc, circle, wave or your own curve with AE's Path Options, so glyphs stay sharp and upright.

Background rendering

start-render hands the render queue to aerender, which renders the saved project in its own After Effects process while yours stays usable (pass saveProject: true to save first). Follow it with render-status. inProcess: true renders inside AE instead, queueInAME: true sends the queue to Media Encoder, and AE_RENDER_PATH points at aerender if it isn't found automatically.

Example

examples/relay-engaging/ is the video at the top: one build.jsx that builds the whole project (rebuild it in seconds through evalScript), the expressions it uses, and what was measured along the way.

Companion tools

tools/frame_tools.py makes contact sheets, frame metrics, visual diffs and GIF previews from rendered frames (needs Pillow). tools/audio_tools.py extracts amplitude envelopes, onsets and BPM from audio, ready for applyValueCurve and bpmMarkers (needs numpy and ffmpeg).

Troubleshooting

Security

The server only listens on 127.0.0.1, but anything on your machine that can reach that port can run commands in After Effects, including evalScript, which runs arbitrary ExtendScript. Use it on a machine you trust.

Development

npm run build   # bundles src/index.ts with esbuild and copies src/scripts → build/scripts

Panel changes need a reinstall (npm run install-bridge) and an After Effects restart; commands.jsx changes only need a server restart.

Credits

Started as a fork of Dakkshin/after-effects-mcp; the socket bridge, multi-session hub, command pack, background rendering and most of the server have since been rewritten, and the original layer and composition commands still live in the panel. The skills adapt the video styles of Bart's motion-graphics skills (MIT; see skills/LICENSE-motion-graphics.md); the sound-pass method is by Vox (@Voxyz_ai).

License

MIT. See LICENSE.