Load, run, and render After Effects plugins (.aex) outside of After Effects.
aexlo is a Rust crate that emulates the After Effects plugin runtime.
It loads and renders .aex plugins by re-implementing the AE Plugin SDK —
the same interface After Effects itself exposes to plugins.
By default, host-dependent features (such as UI and application callbacks) are left unimplemented, giving you full control over what to override and how to integrate plugins into your own application.
Adobe After Effects is the most widely used video editor in the world,
and there is a rich ecosystem of powerful plugins built for it.
However, all of these plugins are designed to run exclusively within After Effects.
aexlo emulates the After Effects plugin runtime, allowing AE plugins to run outside of After Effects entirely — much like Wine runs Windows applications on Linux.
- Plugin developers who want to test their plugins without spinning up a full After Effects instance.
- Software developers who want to make their software compatible with After Effects plugins.
- Artists who want to integrate After Effects plugins into their image processing workflows.
- Load and render After Effects plugins outside of After Effects.
- Selectively override or re-implement SDK commands, suites, and callbacks to fit your specific workflow.
Warning
This project is currently under heavy development. The latest progress of this project can be seen on the master branch.
- Rust 1.80.0 or higher
Note
This crate requires Rust Nightly due to its use of the C variadic arguments feature.
- Windows x64 or macOS arm64
Note
After Effects plugins target Windows and macOS only, so Linux is not currently supported.
cargo build⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣿⣶⣀⣀⣀⣀⣀⣀⣀⣀⣀ 43% (15/35)
○ fully implemented / △ only partially implemented / × not implemented
| CB Suites | Effect Suites | Adv Effect Suites | Others |
|---|---|---|---|
| ○ ANSI | △ AE App | × AE Adv App | × Cache On Load |
| × Batch Sampling | △ AngleParam | × AE Adv Item | × Channel |
| ○ Color | ○ ColorParam | × AE Adv Time | △ GPU Device |
| ○ Color16 | × Effect Custom UI Overlay Theme | × Plugin Helper | |
| ○ ColorFloat | × Effect Custom UI | × Plugin Helper 2 | |
| ○ Fill Matte | × Effect UI | ||
| ○ Handle | ○ Param Utils | ||
| ○ Iterate8 | × Path Data | ||
| ○ Iterate16 | × Path Query | ||
| ○ IterateFloat | ○ PointParam | ||
| ○ Pixel Data | |||
| × Pixel Format | |||
| × Sampling8 | |||
| × Sampling16 | |||
| × SamplingFloat | |||
| ○ World | |||
| ○ World Transform |
This project is licensed under the MIT License.