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Pre-composing has been an essential part of After Effects forever, but it hasn’t really been updated since the beginning. You guessed it, we’ve given it a complete overhaul with auto-cropping, padding and a whole bunch of new stuff to boot. Pre-compose Pro is a plugin so it appears in the Layer menu, right below the old Pre-compose button. You’ll never need to use the old and outdated Pre-compose ever again!

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Key features

Smart naming

Build names from placeholders ([c] comp name, [l] layer name, [#] auto-incrementing index), plus an automatic prefix and suffix.

Adjust duration to content

Trim the new composition to the time span of the layers inside it, instead of inheriting the parent comp’s full duration.

Crop to content

Resize the new composition to fit its visible content, at the current time or across the whole duration, with optional padding.

Pre-compose layers separately

Turn each selected layer into its own pre-comp in one go.

Set the label color

Assign the new pre-comp layer a label in the same step, using your actual label names and colors.

Take over the native shortcut

Optionally rebind Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+C so Pre-compose Pro opens instead of the native dialog.
Everything runs as a single undoable step, and the dialog remembers all of your choices for next time.

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Requirements

Unlike our panel-based tools, Pre-compose Pro is a native plugin. It lives in the Layer menu, not Window > Extensions.
  • After Effects version 24.4 or later
  • An active Pre-compose Pro license, activated through the Tack Studio app (see Installing tools)