Adobe After Effects

The Company of Science & Art (CoSA), the original developer of After Effects, was founded in June 1990 in Providence, Rhode Island, by Brown University graduates Greg Deocampo, David Foster, David Herbstman and David Simons. Under its original business plan, CoSA was to have artists and programmers working side by side to produce multimedia content and become a content provider for the electronic age; its only starting capital was Deocampo’s $30,000 investment.⁠[1][1][2][1][1]

CoSA’s first CD-ROM publication, Connections: The CoSA Journal, drew little interest, so the team turned its animation playback tool into a product: PACo (PICS Animation Compiler) was started as an internal tool in September 1990 and shipped in May 1991 as PACo 1.0 and QuickPICS 1.0, streaming animations with synchronized sound from CD-ROM across platforms. After Apple announced QuickTime in June 1991, CoSA decided to look for a new product.⁠[1][1][3][3][1]

Choosing an animated effects program from among several ideas, the team first planned “Lort,” a large architecture able to process any kind of time-based media, but could not find investors willing to fund it, so in June 1992 it switched to the smaller “Egg” project, named after the Egg Roll on the menu of a nearby restaurant. Egg was the first code name of After Effects; David Cotter and Dan Wilk, engineering interns who joined that summer, worked on the user interface and effect plug-ins respectively.⁠[1][1][3][1][2][1]

Egg was first demonstrated to the press in a private suite at MacWorld Boston in August 1992 and shown to the public for the first time at a multimedia show in Santa Clara, California, in September. When it came to a formal name, the team’s top vote-getter was Effecstacy, which then-president Bill O’Farrell vetoed for its drug-related implication; the product was finally named After Effects, and in memory of the naming dispute its four-character operating system identifier is still FXTC. Simons later recalled that the team saw Egg as an effects program at the time and only realized in hindsight that it was essentially a compositing application with effects as just one of its tools.⁠[1][1][1][1][1][1][1]

After Effects 1.0 (code-named Egg) was released in January 1993 and first sold to the public at MacWorld San Francisco; its main developers included David Herbstman, David Simons, Daniel Wilk, David Cotter and Russell Belfer. Simons recalled that version 1.0 was very simple: no Timeline window, one effect per layer, no transfer modes or motion blur, and one mask per layer; the Time Layout window showed only one layer at a time until version 2.0.⁠[4][1][1][5]

Version 1.1, released in May 1993, was later also bundled dongle-free with the SuperMac Digital Film video card under the name After Image.⁠[1][5]

About six months after version 1.0 launched, CoSA agreed to be acquired by Aldus Corporation; the acquisition was completed in July 1993, when CoSA had 15 employees.⁠[1][3][1]

After Effects 2.0 (code-named Teriyaki) was released in January 1994; the same month, After Effects won MacUser Eddy Awards for Best Special Effects Program and Software Product of the Year. Between April and June 1994, ten CoSA employees moved to Seattle, and on August 31, 1994, Aldus merged with Adobe SystemsAdobeAdobe (Adobe Inc.) is a software company headquartered in San Jose, California, founded in 1982 by John Warnock and Charles Geschke. Known for PostScript, PDF and creative software such as Acrobat, Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro and After Effects, it moved its main creative products to Creative Cloud subscriptions from 2013 and expanded into digital marketing and generative AI; it is listed on Nasdaq under the ticker ADBE.Open the full entry, making After Effects an Adobe product.⁠[4][3][1][3][6]

Adobe’s fiscal 1994 annual report described After Effects 2.0 as a Macintosh motion graphics, digital compositing and special effects program for broadcast video and film, retailing for about $1,995; competing software from companies such as Parallax and Discreet Logic cost more than $25,000, and dedicated hardware from Quantel and other companies more than $500,000.⁠[6][6]

After Effects 3.0 (code-named Nimchow), released in October 1995, was the first version of After Effects from Adobe; version 3.1 followed in April 1996.⁠[4][5][1]

After Effects had previously been available only on the Mac; a Windows version of 3.1 was released in May 1997.⁠[5][1]

After Effects went on to release new versions, keeping internal code names that were mostly food puns: 4.0 (ebeer) in January 1999, 4.1 (Batnip) in September 1999, 5.0 (Melmet) in April 2001, 5.5 (Fauxfu) in January 2002, 6.0 (Foodfite) in August 2003, 6.5 (Chambant) on June 16, 2004, 7.0 (Clamchop) in January 2006, 8.0 (Metaloaf) on July 2, 2007, 9.0 (Chinchillada) on September 23, 2008, 10.0 (Esgocart) on April 30, 2010, 11.0 (SpinalTapas) on April 23, 2012, 12.0 (Sconehenge) on June 17, 2013, and 13.0 (Goatmeal Stout) on June 18, 2014.⁠[1][1][1][1][4][4]

Through several corporate changes the After Effects team stayed together, with Simons and Wilk continuing as engineering managers at Adobe; Simons wrote in his afterword that more than 20 employees were then working on After Effects full-time in Adobe’s Seattle office.⁠[1][1][1]

In May 2013, Adobe announced that new features would be delivered exclusively to Creative Cloud subscribers and that Creative Suite 6, released in May 2012, would be the last major update for perpetual licensees. After Effects thereafter became available through Creative Cloud or as an individual subscription, while a perpetual license of After Effects CS6 could still be purchased.⁠[7][7]

In 2018 Adobe marked the 25th year of After Effects with interviews, video tips and livestream demos, including a feature video in which co-founders Dave Simons and Dave Cotter recounted the software’s history.⁠[5][5]

In December 2018, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced that it would present a Scientific and Engineering Award (Academy Plaque) to After Effects for its design and development, with Dave Simons, Daniel Wilk, James Acquavella, Michael Natkin and David Cotter as recipients; Photoshop received an award of the same kind that year. The ceremony was held in Beverly HillsBeverly HillsBeverly Hills is an incorporated city in Los Angeles County, California, known for its film-industry residents, Rodeo Drive shopping district and hotels. Incorporated on January 28, 1914, it covers about 5.71 square miles and recorded 32,701 residents in the 2020 census. It operates under a council–manager system. The Metro D Line extension reached Wilshire/La Cienega in May 2026.Open the full entry on February 9, 2019.⁠[8][8][9][9][3]

In his acceptance speech, Simons said After Effects represented more than 600 person-years of work by about 100 team members over the years. He was an Adobe Fellow at the time.⁠[10][9]

On January 20, 2026, ahead of the Sundance Film Festival, Adobe released a major After Effects update adding native 3D parametric meshes (combinable shapes such as cubes, spheres and cylinders, plus new spot and parallel shadows), more than 1,300 free Substance 3D materials, variable font animation through the Text Animator, and a vector workflow that imports SVG files as native shape layers while keeping gradients and transparency editable.⁠[11][11][12][11][11][11]

In September 2026, Adobe released After Effects 26.5 (also called the September 2026 release in its documentation), focused on performance and workflow: Object Matte, the AI-powered automatic rotoscoping tool added in version 26.2, gained disk caching, guides gained percentage-based positioning, and the Effect Controls panel was updated. A beta released at the same time added an agentic AI Assistant that lets users operate the software with natural-language instructions and can also write JavaScript expressions; version 26.5 supports Windows 11 and macOS 14.0 and later, is available by subscription only, and costs $34.49 a month or $263.88 a year as a single-app subscription.⁠[13][13][13][13][13][13][13][13]

Version 26.5 also added ACES 2.0 support and a Frame.io V4 panel; at the same time Adobe announced that upcoming v27 releases would end support for Intel-based Macs.⁠[14][14][14]

In September 2026, HiggsfieldHiggsfieldHiggsfield is an AI visual-content company founded in 2023 and headquartered in San Francisco. Beginning with the Diffuse mobile app, it developed a browser-based production platform for creators, marketing teams and enterprises, combining proprietary and third-party models for images, video, storyboards, character consistency and multi-step creative work.Open the full entry connected its creative tools to Claude through the Model Context Protocol (MCP): using Higgsfield’s hosted services and Adobe plugin, Claude can call more than 30 image and video models, build compositions, animate layers, write expressions and output an editable After Effects project. Higgsfield says the result is a standard .aep file with layers, keyframes, typography and expressions; the full workflow requires subscriptions to Higgsfield, Claude and After Effects.⁠[15][15][15]

On October 2, 2026, ArtCraftArtCraftArtCraft is an open-source AI image and video creation tool founded by Brandon Thomas, with its team based in Atlanta. It grew out of the AI creative company Storyteller and uses 2D and 3D canvases, character posing and scene blocking to control generated results. In October 2026, ArtCraft launched Crafting Apps, a series of open-source applications written in Rust and modeled on major Adobe and Microsoft software; Thomas said they were developed with the help of Claude Opus 5.5, and the project quickly drew attention as well as controversy over its completeness, copyright and security.Open the full entry founder Brandon ThomasBrandon ThomasBrandon Thomas is a software engineer, entrepreneur and independent filmmaker based in Atlanta who formerly worked as an engineer at Square and founded the speech synthesis website FakeYou, the AI creative company Storyteller.ai and the open-source AI image and video tool ArtCraft. In October 2026, under the ArtCraft name, he released seven open-source Rust applications modeled on Adobe’s main programs, saying they were written with the help of Claude Opus 5.5, drawing attention and controversy.Open the full entry said on Hacker News that he was using Opus 5.5 to write pure-Rust open-source implementations of Adobe’s entire suite, with EffectCraft corresponding to After Effects. The EffectCraft project describes itself as a clean-room reimplementation of After Effects rebuilt in pure Rust, developed only from After Effects’ public documentation and observable behavior without using Adobe’s files, icons, presets or code, and dual-licensed under MIT or Apache-2.0.⁠[16][16][17][17][17]

On October 9, 2026, under an animation demo posted on its X account, Higgsfield said that creating this kind of animation had always required a set of tools such as After Effects, Blender and Cinema 4DCinema 4DCinema 4D is 3D animation, modeling, simulation and rendering software developed by the German company Maxon, known for its MoGraph motion graphics toolset and its integration with After Effects, and widely used for broadcast graphics, advertising and film and television visual design. It grew out of FastRay, a ray-tracing program written on the Commodore Amiga by brothers Christian and Philip Losch, and has been released under the Cinema 4D name since 1993; Maxon is now a brand of the Nemetschek Group.Open the full entry, but could now be done using only Claude and Higgsfield KatanaKatana (Higgsfield)Katana is a Claude skill launched by Higgsfield on October 8, 2026, that runs inside Claude through the Higgsfield MCP: users pick a preset or upload a reference edit, add images of characters, products or clothing, and generate videos in aura-farming, motion graphics or clipping styles. Higgsfield says it is powered by Anthropic’s Claude Motion and is the company’s most powerful AI video editing tool.Open the full entry, stressing that no video generation was used and that it was all code.⁠[18][18][18]

After Effects is used for compositing, motion graphics and special effects in digital post-production for film, broadcast and video; it works with other post-production applications, and Maxon’s Cinema 4D offers native After Effects integration, with Cineware bringing Cinema 4D scenes into Adobe applications with live updates.⁠[6][6][7][19][19]

Adobe After Effects: Official website: https://www.adobe.com/products/aftereffects.html (opens in a new window).⁠[8]

CoSA: Archived official website: https://cosa.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[3]