Claude AI Assistant for After Effects

I’d seen a few After Effects scripts floating around that wired up AI assistants inside the app, and I wanted to see how far the expression and script API could actually be pushed. The result is a CEP extension that puts Claude directly inside After Effects — accessible via Window > Extensions > Claude AI Assistant — and lets you describe what you want the timeline to do in plain English.

What it can do

The clearest wins are the things the AE scripting API handles reliably: animating layers, adding keyframes, adjusting opacity, staggering animations across a sequence. Ask it to fade in all text layers from 0% to 100% opacity in a staggered manner and it does exactly that — scans the comp for text layers, adds the keyframes, spaces them out. You can see the result in the timeline immediately.

It understands the layer structure of your composition, which matters. If a text layer is nested inside a group, it knows that. If you want to target only the top-level text layers, it figures that out without you having to specify it manually.

Where it gets interesting (and experimental)

The more ambitious requests — like creating a new 16:9 composition using an existing 1:1 comp as a layout reference and repositioning elements accordingly — start to push against the edges of what the scripting API can cleanly express. Some of those operations are less script and more editorial judgment, and that’s where you hit partial results or errors. It’s genuinely exploratory territory.

But the partial results are still interesting. The composition gets partially built. Elements move. The direction is right even when the execution isn’t complete. That tells you something about where the ceiling is and what the right prompt structure might look like to get past it. The foundation is solid — the question is how much of After Effects’ behavior can be reliably described and executed through the scripting layer alone. Still figuring that out.