Summary
Everything runs through a panel you keep open inside After Effects.
That is the setup cost and the thing that will trip you up: run the bridge installer once, then keep mcp-bridge-auto.jsx open, or commands queue and never execute. Some After Effects operations also finish after the tool call returns — get-results is where the final state shows up.
What it is
An MCP server that controls Adobe After Effects through a bridge panel running inside the application. The server writes commands to a file; the panel polls it and executes them.
What you get
- Composition and layer work: create-composition, create-adjustment-layer, center-layers, get-layer-clip-frames
- Effects by name or matchName, plus property editing and removal: apply-effect, add-any-effect, set-effect-property, remove-effect
- Effect keyframes with temporal and spatial graph controls — set-effect-keyframe
- Discovery of what is installed: list-available-effects, list-layer-effects
- Presets: apply-preset for .ffx files, list-presets, search-presets
- Markers and audio: add-marker, add-markers-bulk, set-audio-levels, get-audio-info, analyze-audio-waveform
- General escape hatches: run-script, get-results, get-help
Requirements
Adobe After Effects, Node.js 18+ and npm. Clone, npm install, npm run build, then npm run install-bridge. In After Effects, enable Allow Scripts to Write Files and Access Network, and keep the mcp-bridge-auto.jsx panel open while you work.
Setup effort
One command — npx -y after-effects-mcp