SDK Audience

You must be a proficient C/C++ programmer to write After Effects plug-ins. While we’ll help with issues specific to the After Effects API, we can’t help you learn your IDE or basic programming concepts.

This SDK guide assumes you understand After Effects from a user’s perspective, and basic motion graphics terminology. If you don’t, get the Adobe After Effects Classroom in a Book, or any of the other fine instructional books on the market. It will help you understand necessary

topics such as alpha channels, pixel aspect ratio, interlacing, color spaces, and more for After Effects.


Development Requirements

The system requirements for After Effects are here: https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/system-requirements.html

The SDK samples have been tested on Xcode 11.3.1 and Xcode 12.4 (for universal binary support with Apple Silicon) on macOS 10.15/11.0, and Microsoft Visual Studio 2019 on Windows 10.