Aphexar Dock
Aphexar
Every module, what it is for, and the one thing about each that is not obvious. The panel is laid out in the order you actually work, so reading it top to bottom is the same as building a shot.
Make the layer, then manage it.
Seven layer types, then duplicate, delete and reorder — everything you do to an empty timeline before anything is animated.
The next thing you do is almost always to the new layer. Copies also come out in the same order as the originals rather than mirrored.
Move the pivot without moving the layer.
Nine positions. Click a cell and the anchor point goes there.
On a text or shape layer the layer itself is comp-sized, so “centre” in most scripts lands nowhere near the text. With Real content bounds on, it measures the ink instead — that is the difference you will feel first.
And keyframed Position survives: every key is offset by the same amount rather than flattened to one value.
Move the layer, not the pivot.
The same nine cells doing the opposite job: top-left puts the layer’s
top-left corner in the comp’s top-left corner. Margin insets it
from the edges.
Anchor shows a solid layer outline with a pivot dot. Place shows a dashed comp frame with a small plate pushed into the corner.
Group, ungroup, colour-code.
It will not un-nest a pre-comp that has effects, masks, a blending mode, opacity under 100, time remapping, or that is used in more than one place. Un-nesting any of those changes the render, so it stops and says which one rather than quietly giving you something different.
Layer switches, and the composition masters beneath them.
Marking layers shy does nothing visible until the composition is told to hide shy layers. Same with motion blur. The panel warns you when you set one without the other — that is why the masters sit directly underneath.
Select two layers. The upper one mattes the lower.
After Effects reports selected layers in the order you clicked them, not stacking order — so clicking the lower one first would matte the wrong way round. The Dock sorts by position instead.
Cut, trim and move in time.
Trim shortens and can always be dragged back out. Cut genuinely removes. For most editing, trim is the safer reflex — use Cut when you actually want two separate pieces and only need one.
Pick keys here instead of hunting the timeline.
Read lists every keyframed property on the selection. Each key
is drawn as its real After Effects shape, so a key here looks like the key
there.
Each half is drawn from its own side, so a linear-in, ease-out key shows as half diamond, half hourglass — exactly like the timeline.
Ticking a key selects it in After Effects, so Curve below acts on
precisely what you picked. Delete selected removes those keys
from that property.
A real easing editor. The paid tool on most toolbars.
Drag both handles or take a preset, then Apply to keyframes. It works across every selected key on every selected property at once.
The read-out is the same cubic-bezier(x1, y1, x2, y2) used in
CSS, and the slope at each end is exactly what the name says:
start = y1 / x1 end = (1−y2) / (1−x2)
Small slope is slow, large is fast. The dashed diagonal behind the curve is linear, for comparison. Handles drag past the box so overshoot is drawable.
Twenty-four effects, ranked by how often they are actually used.
Not a guess and not a top-ten from the internet. These were counted from seventy-six effect breakdowns taken from real course lessons, most-used first — and every one ships with After Effects, so there is nothing extra to install.
Check the renderer. Advanced 3D silently disables effects on 3D text and shape layers — Classic 3D does not. The Dock warns you when it spots that combination, because otherwise it looks like the effect simply failed.
Save before you run anything that edits a project — this panel and every other script. Every action here lands as a single undo step, and there is an Undo button in the Timeline section.
Read the strip at the bottom. Every action says what it did, and every refusal says why and names the layer. If a button appears to do nothing and the strip stays silent, that is a bug worth reporting.
Aphexar Dock · free to use