Introducing the Workbench Multi-tool!

That's a lot of space, but this thing can be tiny. So what is Multi-tool? It is our way of fixing all of the little annoyances that After Effects gives us. For example, did you open a new project, double-click on the project panel and the folder that loads is from the previous project? Annoying, right? Opt/Alt click the folder icon and it'll set that default import to be where your current project is.

Are you working on something and the volume of the audio is too loud for your background music? Click the audio waveform and it'll lower by 10dB (or whatever you set) for all of the audio in the project. Click it with shift to go back for render time.

There are a lot of useful things in here to fix AE to be a LOT less annoying. The best part? This will be updated over time for our Patrons as we fix more and more issues with AE.

Currently here's where we stand:

• Swap comps - if you made a new comp, meant to rename it but just started working in it and now the names don't make sense, click this to swap the names of selected comps.

• Layer Markers to Comp - You know how it's annoying that you can't j/k through comp markers or that you put markers on an audio layer or somethign and now you need them to show up outside of your precomp? Click this to swap the markers or duplicate them from layer to comp or vice versa.

• Reveal Project Folder - Click this to reveal the current project folder. Opt/Alt click it to set the default import folder like we mentioned above.

• Toggle Audio Level - As explained above, this will let you toggle the audio project-wide from a lower volume so you can listen to podcasts, etc. and then bump it back for final renders.

• Add Control - This one is still in beta, but it works pretty well so we've included it. Select a property and click this, and you'll get an expression control of the correct type linked to it. It's super handy for splitting up properties like scale or size parameters on rectangle shapes.

• Get Deltas Between Keys - Need to know the change between two keys? No problem. Select any number of keys and this will tell you the difference between the first and last one (so you don't need to be precious about only selecting two keys). It shows time and value change.

Hopefully these all help you to feel just a little less anger at dealing with this aging software. This will be improved over time, and as we move forward, we're going to add full KBar support so you can just pick and choose which things you want to include. We might also build our own settings page so you can hide the ones you might not have a use for, but for now, this is where we're at. Thanks for your support, and please put this to good use. If you have any ideas for anything else, leave a comment and maybe we can fix something else!

Here's the script—it goes in AE's ScriptUI Panels folder—and an SVG in case you want to use it to launch the whole script in KBar. Again, individual tool access for KBar will be coming later.