Your new render queue.

Audio follows your comp, and dropdowns behave at every UI scale.

Audio is set to Auto by default. An export only gets an audio track when the composition actually has audio. A comp with no audio now exports cleanly — no track, no warning, no error. Click the Audio cell to cycle auto / AAC / PCM / muted. Choosing a codec explicitly still always writes a track, silent if there is nothing to record, the same as After Effects does. On the Convert tab, Auto follows the source file.

Dropdowns no longer open past the bottom of the panel. Above 100% UI scale the format menu could place its options somewhere you could not reach or scroll to. Menus are now measured against the panel at its real zoom, so they fit and scroll wherever they open. The Frame.io destination picker and the sign-in popover had the same fault and are fixed with it.

A failed render has a ↻ button. It only ever appeared on finished rows before — the case where you most want to try again was the one without it. Re-running still adds a fresh row and leaves the original alone. Finished conversions on the Convert tab can be re-run the same way.

The destination link changes every selected row. Click a row's path with several rows selected and all of them move, like every other setting on a row already behaves. Pick a folder and each item keeps its own filename. The separate destination button is gone, since the path link covers it.

The selection buttons moved up next to Refresh, beside the rows they act on, instead of sitting at the bottom of the panel.

Everything from the beta, now on the normal update channel.

Frame.io upload, dropdowns that open on macOS, background render fixed on macOS, the warm render engine, the idle-performance pass and chunked encode-and-delete were all beta-only downloads until now. They are all in this update. If you have been running the beta, this build is the same one you already have.

Exports that wouldn't fit on the disk now run. BetterQueue renders your comp to a lossless frame sequence before FFmpeg encodes it, and on a long comp that sequence can want hundreds of gigabytes — so the export was blocked before it started. When space is short, BetterQueue now encodes finished frames in chunks while the render is still running and deletes each frame once it has been encoded, so the temp folder holds about one chunk at a time. The chunks are joined at the end without re-encoding and the audio is muxed in, so the finished file is the same quality it would have been. This engages by itself only when the whole sequence wouldn't fit; an export that fits is unchanged, byte for byte.

A note on that path: it has been proven outside After Effects but has had little use inside it. If an export goes wrong, Report a bug sends the panel log with it.

Beta build, cut from the feat/chunked-encode branch rather than main.

Exports that wouldn't fit on the disk now run

BetterQueue renders your comp to a lossless frame sequence before FFmpeg encodes it, and that sequence is enormous. An 11-minute comp can want hundreds of gigabytes of temp space, so the export was blocked before it started.

When there isn't room for the whole sequence, BetterQueue now encodes finished frames in chunks while the render is still running, and deletes each frame once it has been encoded. The temp folder holds about one chunk at a time: gigabytes instead of hundreds. The chunks are joined at the end without re-encoding and the audio is muxed in, so the finished file is the same quality it would have been.

This engages by itself, and only when the whole sequence wouldn't fit. An export that already had room on the disk is unchanged, byte for byte.

What beta means here

The chunked path has been proven outside After Effects (same output, frames provably deleted mid-run), but it has not yet been through a full export inside AE. That is what this build is for. If a chunked export goes wrong, please report it at https://dexterbrewer.com/feedback so it can be fixed before this reaches a normal release.

Background render fixed on macOS

Fixed — background render works on macOS. On a Mac, hitting Render sent the job to After Effects' render queue even when the background engine was selected. BetterQueue couldn't find the aerender program (on macOS it lives in the version folder beside the app, not where it does on Windows), so it silently fell back to the in-app render queue. It now locates aerender correctly, so background renders run headless in the background as intended.

Dropdowns that open on macOS — and near-instant background renders

Fixed — dropdowns now open on macOS. Every dropdown in the panel (queued-item format, profile, resolution, all the render options, and the Settings menus) used a control that After Effects doesn't draw on a Mac, so the menus wouldn't open there. They're now drawn by the panel itself — they open on both platforms, with keyboard navigation and type-ahead. What each control does is unchanged.

New — background renders start almost instantly (Windows). Instead of waiting ~20–30s for a headless After Effects to boot on every render, BetterQueue keeps a dedicated render engine warm in the background so a Render click starts rendering sub-second. It runs in its own instance — your open project is never touched — falls back to the classic renderer for anything it can't do, and quits itself after a few idle minutes. Turn it on under Settings → Rendering → Warm engine (it asks once for After Effects' "Allow Scripts to Write Files and Access Network" permission). Windows only for now.

Beta build — Frame.io front and center, and a much lighter panel.

Frame.io gets its own column. Every queue row shows its delivery state at a glance — a switch before the render, live upload progress during, and open / copy / share-link buttons once it lands. The header switch flips every row at once, and a f.io pill in the bottom bar (next to FFmpeg''s) handles sign-in, the default destination, and auto-upload without opening Settings.

The panel now costs ~nothing while idle. It had been quietly burning about a quarter of a CPU core doing nothing; measured after the fix: ~2%. The drag-in helper also drops from ~127MB of RAM to ~16MB from your next session. Nothing was removed — Bit just rests until you hover him or a render runs.

Bit floats free beside the wordmark, fully visible — no more clipped chin.

Beta notes: Frame.io is Windows-only and open to invited testers while the integration is in Adobe''s review pipeline. Everything from 2.1.0–2.2.1 is included.

Beta build — Frame.io upload, plus same-day polish. Everything from 2.2.0 (send finished renders to Frame.io: sign in with your Adobe ID, auto-upload, share links on demand — Windows, invited beta testers for now) with two refinements:

• The CPU/RAM meters moved up to the top bar, right beside the Render button.
• Convert no longer shows two ＋ Add files… buttons — just the one in the toolbar.

Also includes the 2.1.0 machined restyle, per-row render times, and click-drag multi-select.

Beta build — Frame.io upload. Finished exports can now send themselves to Frame.io for review.

• Sign in with your Adobe ID under Settings → Frame.io — no keys, no setup. Pick a default destination project or folder, switch on auto-upload, and every render lands on Frame.io the moment it finishes.
• Per-row control. Any row can opt out or aim at its own folder from its drawer; the ⇡ switch on a row toggles uploading at a glance.
• Uploads never hold up renders. They run alongside as their own lane, one at a time, with progress right on the row. A finished upload''s chip opens the asset, copies its link, or creates a share link anyone can view.

Beta notes: Windows only for now (macOS sign-in says so plainly). Image sequences aren''t uploaded yet. Sign-in currently works for invited beta testers while the integration is in Adobe''s review pipeline. Everything from 2.1.0 — the new machined look, render times, CPU/RAM meters — is included.

BetterQueue has been remachined. The whole panel moved from coloured outlines to depth — raised buttons, inset inputs and tracks, flat-ink status — on a quieter, darker graphite base that sits naturally inside After Effects. Square status LEDs, a proper wordmark, and a Settings sheet rebuilt as a single clean column (hover any label for its explanation).

New

• Per-row render time — a finished row shows how long its render took, and History keeps the same figure.
• CPU / RAM meters in the bottom bar show what your machine is doing mid-render. Hover for exact numbers.
• Click-and-drag range select — press on a queue row and sweep across its neighbours.
• Report a bug button in the bottom bar — one click, diagnostics attached.

Improved

• The UI-scale slider applies when you release it instead of re-scaling under your thumb.
• Each row''s settings sits next to the Format menu; the delete × is bigger and easier to hit.
• Topbar spacing evened out; the Est. column (a guess at best) is gone — more room for your queue.

Fixed

• Popups and modals no longer get cut off at UI scales above 100%.

BetterQueue 2.0.18 — Watch your render as it happens

Live render preview. Switch on the eye toggle in the bottom bar and watch the most recent finished frame of a render update as it goes. It's off by default and costs nothing while it's off.

Cleaner layout. Render / Transcode now sits top-right where the action is, and turns into Cancel while a render runs. Simple/Advanced, the FFmpeg engine pill, History and Settings moved down to the bottom bar, and each row carries its own progress — so the separate status strip is gone and there's more room for your queue.

Requeue a finished export. The new ↻ button re-runs it as a fresh row and never overwrites the file you already made.

Fixes

• Delete and Backspace now remove a row even when its settings drawer is open.
• Tooltips appear again — the panel draws its own, because the built-in ones never showed up inside After Effects on macOS.
• Settings now credits FFmpeg (GPLv3) with a link to its source.

Fixes a regression in 2.0.16. If you're on 2.0.16, please update.

Fixed

• Dragging comps from the Project panel into BetterQueue works again. 2.0.16 added a fix to stop Explorer file-drops hijacking the Queue — but it was too broad, and it swallowed comp drags along with them. Dropping footage from Explorer still goes to Convert, exactly as 2.0.16 intended.

Field-confirmed on Windows 11. Everything else in 2.0.16 is unchanged.

First build to reach anyone since 2.0.13 — 2.0.14 and 2.0.15 were built but never released, so everything from them is here too.

Fixed

• Delete and Backspace remove queue rows on Windows again. After Effects takes every key press before the panel can see it unless the panel has claimed that key — and BetterQueue was only claiming the macOS keys, so Windows quietly lost the shortcut.
• Dragging footage in from Explorer stays in Convert. It could flip you over to the Queue and add whatever comp happened to be selected instead.
• No more "Choose a default render folder" pop-up the first time you add a comp. Exports land next to your project (or on the Desktop if it has never been saved), and any row's destination is one click away.
• Resizing the panel no longer adds the selected comp to the queue.
• The "report" link after a failed render opened a dead page; it now opens the feedback form, with diagnostics attached.

Added

• "＋ Add from project" is back, next to Browse… Drag-in still works — this is the way that can't misfire.
• Undo on every add. Queued the wrong thing? Hit Undo in the toast.

Changed

• More of the queue is visible at once — the top bar, toolbar, render bar and row height are all a little tighter.
• The status bar is decluttered, and "details" opens a proper panel with the full log and a Copy button.

Known

• Dragging an effect from Effects & Presets onto the panel queues whatever comp is selected. After Effects tells a panel nothing about its own drags, so BetterQueue can only tell that something was dropped, not what it was. Undo is the answer for now.

The 2.0.x line brought BetterQueue to macOS and ironed it out through field testing. This release also fixes the underlying cause of the panel-refresh crash.

Added

• macOS support, confirmed in the field: the Delete key removes queue items, the destination folder picker uses the native macOS chooser, the panel no longer opens black when After Effects launches with it docked, and comps drag straight from the Project panel into the queue.
• Bug reports carry their own evidence — "Report a bug" auto-attaches the panel's diagnostics, shown on the form and removable before sending.
• Bit is a stress ball — click him for one of twelve tricks while a render grinds.

Changed

• One theme: Mono. An older theme in your settings is migrated to it automatically.
• Renders run one at a time by default — raise it in Settings ▸ Advanced.

Fixed

• Render Defaults lines up, and Bit is no longer cropped mid-trick.
• The panel-refresh crash is traced to the panel's browser engine tearing down the page: our timers and helper callbacks were being run during that teardown. They're now stopped the instant a refresh begins. Any residual error dialog is a limitation of the (end-of-life) browser engine Adobe ships inside CEP panels — harmless, and only on a manual refresh.

Fixed

• The panel-Refresh error dialog, now that the crash report pinned it down. The dump proved it is not the mouse helper (earlier releases chased that) — it's After Effects' own panel engine (CEF's renderer) crashing as it rebuilds the panel's graphics surface on a refresh, with the whole GPU/Metal stack loaded. That browser engine is years out of date and Adobe won't be patching it, so the dialog itself is out of our hands — but this build makes sure BetterQueue stops touching that graphics surface the moment a refresh begins, which is the part we control. It only ever appears on a manual panel refresh, which normal use doesn't need.

Changed

• Diagnostics build. The previous attempt at the panel-Refresh error dialog didn't land, so this build adds instrumentation to pinpoint the real cause instead of guessing again: the background mouse helper now records exactly how it shuts down, and that's auto-attached to bug reports. If you still see the dialog when you refresh the panel, please send a bug report right after — it will say what's actually crashing. No change to how the panel works.

Fixed

• Refreshing the panel no longer pops up After Effects' "Sorry, an error occurred" dialog. It was harmless — the panel always reloaded and worked — but it should never have appeared. The small background helper that tracks the mouse was being killed abruptly when a refresh tore the panel down, and a helper in After Effects' process tree dying that way is what raised Adobe's crash reporter. It now shuts down cleanly on its own instead.

Changed

• One theme now: Mono. The other five (teal, red, amber, violet, light) are gone. BetterQueue sits docked inside After Effects, and an accent colour competing with AE's own interface is just noise. If you were on another theme, you're on this one now.
• Renders run one at a time by default (was two). Each background render is a full headless copy of After Effects wanting its own core and memory — on a machine you're still working on, running two usually costs more than it saves. You can still raise it in Settings ▸ Advanced.

Fixed

• The queue no longer adds comps by itself. 2.0.7 queued a comp every second or two, unprompted. Fixing the helper crash had quietly handed the panel the mouse button back on macOS (it only ever looked missing because the helper was dying before it could report one) — so the panel was running both the real drag detection and the button-free fallback that exists solely for when there is no button. The fallback was misreading an idle cursor as a drag. It now switches itself off for good the moment a real press appears, and can only fire once per drag that genuinely crosses into the panel.
• Refreshing the panel should no longer crash After Effects. The panel's mouse helper was left holding its pipes open while the panel's view was destroyed underneath it. It is now shut down properly on view teardown.

Fixed

• Dragging comps in from the Project panel on macOS — rebuilt. The diagnostics settled it: macOS was never telling the panel the mouse button was down, not once. Global button state needs a privacy permission a managed Mac won't grant, so three earlier fixes were aimed at the wrong thing — the gesture never even started. The panel no longer asks about the button. While After Effects drags a comp it holds the mouse, so the cursor visibly travels across the panel while the panel itself hears nothing — something an ordinary cursor can never do. That's the drag; releasing over the panel is the drop. Covered by 8 new unit tests.
• The panel's mouse helper was crashing on macOS, which is very likely what raised After Effects' "Sorry, an error occurred" dialog (that dialog is Adobe's crash reporter). The calls that crashed it did nothing useful and are gone — the helper now reads cursor position and nothing else.

Fixed

• The black panel at launch is confirmed fixed (by 2.0.5's GPU change, verified in the field). Kept here for the record — 2.0.6 itself is a diagnostics build.

Added

• Bug reports now include the drag watcher's health line — whether macOS lets it see the mouse button, and which of its two button sources has ever fired. If drag still doesn't work: install this, try one drag, send a bug report from Settings. That report decides the fix.

Changed

• The panel is drawn by the GPU again. Every black-boot on macOS happened with GPU drawing forced off (a leftover from a Windows paint bug that never re-appeared), and the field data proved a page reload cannot cure the wedge — so the likely cause is removed instead. Install this build, fully quit and relaunch After Effects, then launch with the panel docked a few times and report what you see.

Added

• The drag watcher audits its own senses. On macOS it now reads the mouse button two independent ways and checks whether macOS is even willing to expose global input to it — reported live in Settings' drag line (perm= / ns-downs= / cg-downs=) and attached to bug reports. If those counts stay at zero while you drag, macOS is hiding the button behind a privacy permission, and the next build will walk you through granting it.
• Bug reports now also attach the previous boot's trace — the boot that failed is never the one you're reporting from.

Fixed

• The black panel at launch now heals itself. Field diagnostics finally showed what it is: the panel's code runs perfectly — the browser engine inside After Effects just never draws a first frame when the panel boots docked while AE is starting, and only a manual panel Refresh wakes it. The panel now automates that: if nothing has painted 8 seconds after boot, it refreshes itself once. If an After Effects error dialog appears on its own around launch, that's the automated refresh doing what you used to do by hand — please report whether it shows up.

Added

• Drag-and-drop flight recorder. Every press/release now records where it happened, what the panel believed its own screen position was, and why a drop was or wasn't accepted — shown live in Settings and auto-attached to bug reports. If drag-in still fails for you: try one drag, then send a bug report straight away from Settings.

Fixed

• Dragging comps in from the Project panel on macOS should finally land. The panel used to ask macOS where it sits on screen to decide whether a drag was released over it — and for a docked panel, macOS lies (the panel has no window of its own). It now works out its own position from the mouse itself and decides drops from that. Please drag something in and say what happens.

Added

• Bug reports pack their own evidence. "Report a bug" (Settings) now auto-attaches the panel's boot trace and the tail of its last failure log to the feedback form. The form shows the attachment and lets you remove it before sending — nothing is sent without you seeing it. A report arrives with the file we'd otherwise have to ask you to dig out.

The macOS beta-test build

This release exists to verify the macOS work in the field — it fixes the four issues from the first real Mac test, and every one of them needs confirming on a real Mac. If you're testing: thank you, and please send what you find through Settings ▸ Report a bug (it pre-fills your version).

Fixed on macOS:

• The Delete key removes queue items. macOS hands panel keystrokes to After Effects unless the panel asks for them specifically — it asks now.
• The destination folder picker actually picks folders — replaced with the native Mac chooser.
• No more black panel when AE launches with BetterQueue docked. The panel was booting into a half-started After Effects (and a manual Refresh then tripped AE's error dialog). It now waits until AE answers before touching it, and shows a loading indicator from the first frame. If a boot ever goes wrong it writes boot-trace.txt next to its settings (~/Library/Application Support/BetterQueue/) — send that file.
• Drag-from-Project-panel rebuilt for Mac — it never had a real "is the cursor over the panel" test there. Please try it.

Also in this build (all platforms):

• Bit is a stress ball — click him. Twelve tricks, dealt so you never get the same one twice in a row, and he performs mid-render without interrupting anything.
• Render Defaults popover properly aligned; Bit no longer cropped mid-trick.

AEmpeg is now BetterQueue

Same tool. Clearer name.

"AEmpeg" was a pun on FFmpeg — the engine doing the encoding under the hood. That's a decent joke if you already know what FFmpeg is, and completely meaningless if you don't. BetterQueue says what it actually is: a replacement for the After Effects render queue.

Nothing about how it works has changed. Same renderer, same formats, same presets, same speed. This release is the rename and nothing else.

What this means for you

• The panel is now at Window ▸ Extensions ▸ BetterQueue.
• It installs as a new panel rather than updating AEmpeg. If you had AEmpeg installed, you can remove it — the two are independent and the old one won't update itself.
• Because it's a new panel, it starts with fresh settings and fetches its own copy of FFmpeg on the first export.

Tell me what's broken

Report a bug, and it actually reaches me. Settings ▸ Report a bug and Request a feature now open a feedback form on dexterbrewer.com with the tool and your exact version already filled in. "Report a bug" also copies your last diagnostics to the clipboard, ready to paste in.

If you ever tried to report something from AEmpeg and landed on a GitHub 404 — that was the old button, the repository behind it is private, and your report never reached me. Sorry. That's fixed.

The panel is now drawn by the CPU, not the GPU. Some machines were painting it wrong: text missing entirely, the teal accent coming out orange, half the window left as stale white after a Refresh. Missing glyphs and wrong colours are the graphics driver failing, not the panel — so AEmpeg no longer asks it to do the job. The UI is small and static, so there's nothing to lose. This needs a full After Effects restart to take effect.

To be straight with you: I have not been able to reproduce that fault on demand, so I can't promise it's gone — I've removed the most likely cause. Which is why:

If the panel ever does stop drawing, it now notices and says so instead of sitting there as a blank white rectangle, and writes a diagnostics file. If it happens to you, please send it through the new feedback form — that's exactly the report I need.

Also

• Settings fits your dock again. It used to stretch edge to edge on a wide panel and split into five thin strips of tiny text, and on a narrow one it pushed its own close button off the top of the screen. It now grows to a comfortable width and stops, centred — one column narrow, three at its widest.
• Settings shows where your files really are (~\AEmpeg), not the %APPDATA% path it used to claim and that never existed.
• Drag-and-drop from the Project panel is steadier: its watcher no longer spins all night, restarts itself if it dies, and a locked screen no longer teleports your cursor to the corner.

If you installed 1.1.0, please update. It was tagged before the fixes below actually landed, so the panel could still be taken over by the Render Queue on export. This is the build 1.1.0 was meant to be.

Fixed

• The Render Queue can no longer take over the panel. Renders happen in a separate, headless copy of After Effects, and the live render queue is now genuinely untouchable — no fallback, no exceptions. A comp whose name isn't unique gets a temporary render alias instead of a queue item, and a render that fails tells you why instead of quietly costing you the panel.
• A single comp with a duplicate name renders again. It used to fail outright.
• Cancel no longer leaves a broken file behind. Stopping an export deletes the half-written file instead of leaving something that looks finished and isn't.
• Exports match your project's colour settings. AEmpeg used to tag every export Rec.709 no matter what — which is wrong for the many projects working in sRGB, and wrong again for OCIO or ACES. It now reads the project's working space and tags to match, or writes no tag at all rather than a misleading one. If your exports have ever come back looking washed out, this is why.
• Untagged exports are no longer colour-shifted. FFmpeg quietly converts colour with Rec.601 coefficients when nothing tells it otherwise, while every player assumes Rec.709. AEmpeg now says what it means.

Added

• Bit, the render robot, now lives in the panel. He idles while you work and runs a film-scan animation while your render does.

The redesign release — a new panel, GPU encoding, drag-and-drop from the Project panel, and the end of the render queue: every comp export is now fully renderless, so AEmpeg never touches your live Render Queue for any export, at any depth.

A redesigned panel

The queue is a cleaner teal-on-graphite grid with a Simple / Advanced density switch, a settings drawer that unfolds beneath each row (no more floating popup), search and status filter chips, and a narrow-dock layout — below ~640px the grid becomes a card list, so the panel works docked to the side, not just along the bottom. Settings is now a wide multi-column sheet that fits a bottom dock without scrolling.

GPU (hardware) encoding

H.264, HEVC and AV1 via NVIDIA NVENC, Intel Quick Sync, AMD AMF and Apple VideoToolbox. Off by default, offered per export as an Encoder choice: CPU — best quality per MB or GPU — much faster, bigger files. AEmpeg detects your hardware by actually test-encoding with it (not by trusting FFmpeg's compiled-in list), and falls back to software silently if a GPU disappears. Settings → GPU encoding shows what was found.

Drag comps in from the Project panel

Drag a composition (or footage) out of AE's Project panel and drop it on AEmpeg — comps join the render queue, footage goes to Convert, and a drop target lights up while you drag. Windows is the tested path; macOS is best-effort, and the ＋ Add from project button always works.

Convert, per file

Convert is now the same grid as the render queue: every file carries its own format, quality, resolution, alpha, audio and destination, editable inline — one batch can send interview.mov → ProRes and promo.mp4 → H.265 at once.

Fixed: the panel no longer switches away mid-render

16-bit and straight-matte exports were the last ones still touching the live Render Queue — which is what raised the RQ panel and swapped AEmpeg's dock frame for a timeline tab. All comp exports are now renderless.

Fixed: 16-bit intermediates are now real

After Effects silently refuses script control of an output module's depth, so every previous "16-bit" export was actually writing an 8-bit intermediate. AEmpeg now uses AE's genuinely deep stock templates where the install has them, sets render depth through the typed API, and — if no deep path exists — says so on the row instead of pretending. Settings → Diagnostics shows what your install supports.

Destination filename fix — a fast patch for a field-reported export failure.

Fixed

• Exports no longer fail when a destination filename is typed without an extension. Typing a name without .mp4 in the Edit-destination dialog produced a path FFmpeg can't mux ("Unable to choose an output format") — and the failure only surfaced after the full After Effects render. AEmpeg now adds the format's extension automatically wherever a destination is set: the destination dialog, format/container changes on queue rows, and a run-time check that heals older saved queues before rendering starts.
• Folder names containing dots (like 03.Boreal) can no longer be mistaken for the file's extension when changing a row's container.

AEmpeg now keeps itself current from inside After Effects.

In-app updates

When a newer version is out, a banner appears at the top of the panel with What's new and Get update — no more checking the website by hand. (Replaces the old release-link notice with a proper in-panel banner + changelog.)

Built-in changelog & Updates settings

A "What's new" changelog is built in, and a new Settings ▸ Updates section lets you turn the launch check on/off and check on demand.

Three field fixes from the first day of hard use.

Fixed

• Alpha rows died at prepare with "Object of type Error found where a Number, Array, or Property is needed": an ExtendScript host error exploded while being logged, turning a survivable output-module hiccup into a fatal one. Error logging in the AE bridge is now explosion-proof, and the premultiplied alpha case no longer touches the output module at all (the alpha templates already carry the right matte).
• "Undo group mismatch, will attempt to fix" modal — the audio render held an undo group open across rq.render(), which AE's renderer disturbs internally. The group now closes before the render starts.
• AE's Render Queue panel taking over AEmpeg's dock — AE can raise the panel after the script call that caused it returns, beating the immediate hide. AEmpeg now re-asserts itself with follow-up calls after prepares, item completions, and cleanup. Live audio renders may still flash the RQ panel for a few seconds (unavoidable while AE's engine is blocked — full fix planned via aerender audio in 0.5.0).

The beta-readiness patch — the classic exporter complaints, preempted.

Fixed

• Washed-out colors after export (the QuickTime gamma shift): yuv video outputs are now tagged Rec.709 (primaries/transfer/matrix + TV range) with a proper colr atom in MOV/MP4. Advanced → Color tags can disable it for special pipelines.
• macOS output paths — destinations were built with a hardcoded \, which becomes part of the file name on mac.
• A panel crash now shows the error with Copy details + Reload instead of a blank white panel.
• macOS: first-export auto-download fetches ffprobe too, and AEmpeg's data moved to ~/Library/Application Support/AEmpeg (migrated automatically).

Added

• Disk-space preflight — exports estimate their uncompressed intermediate size and refuse to start with a clear message when the temp volume is too small, instead of dying mid-render.
• Temp render folder setting (Settings → Advanced) for pointing the multi-GB intermediates at a roomy drive.
• Report a bug buttons (status bar on failure + Settings footer) — diagnostics copied, prefilled GitHub issue opened.
• ~time left in render and encode progress.
• BETA.md — beta install guide and the 20-minute test script.

The throughput-and-trust release: renders run in parallel, the queue survives restarts, and everything you've ever rendered is one click from running again.

Highlights

• Parallel background rendering — with the background engine (now the default), 2–3 renders run at once (Settings → Advanced → Simultaneous renders). The queue prepares every item, saves the project once, then fans out one headless aerender per worker. Per-row progress bars run side by side, Cancel stops every process, and After Effects stays usable the whole time.
• The queue survives restarts — rows persist per project across panel reloads, AE restarts, and crashes. A queued comp that has since been deleted stays visible as a flagged row instead of vanishing.
• Export history — every finished render (ok or failed) is logged with its full settings snapshot (the ⟲ button, 500 entries). Search it, reveal outputs, or Re-queue an entry with the exact same settings.
• Alpha column — Off / Premult / Straight per row for alpha-capable formats (ProRes 4444, Hap Alpha, VP9, WebP, PNG/TIFF/EXR). The matte is applied by AE at render time, and switching alpha on drives whatever carries it for that codec — toggle, profile, or pixel format.
• Resolution column — Full, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, or any custom 1/n fraction per row.
• Work-area ranges — newly added comps use their work area (B/N) as the render range by default; an untouched work area still renders the full comp.
• Row reordering — move selected rows up/down; the Added sort order is the order renders run in.
• Update notice — the panel checks GitHub releases once a day and offers a one-click jump when a newer version exists.
• UI refresh — single-row header, compact centered Render button with the selection tools and settings gear on the same row, a Defaults dropdown (formerly the Output pill) where presets are made, rebalanced grid columns, and a wider Browse popup.
• Click a comp's name in the queue to open it in AE's Composition viewer.

Changed

• The background engine is now the default. Existing installs are migrated once (a toast explains); switch back anytime in Settings → Advanced and your choice sticks. In-app remains the automatic fallback for unsaved projects or a missing aerender.
• ExtendScript tracks every AEmpeg render-queue item by a comment tag and sweeps leftovers from crashed sessions at the start of every run.

AEmpeg by DexterLabs — FFmpeg for After Effects.

The power-user release: the comp workflow was redesigned around a spreadsheet render queue (chosen from 22 design prototypes across four rounds), and the pipeline is now field-verified end to end — audio muxing, render ranges, and the new background engine included.

First packaged build of AEmpeg — FFmpeg for After Effects, by DexterLabs.

> Pre-release. The pipeline is field-verified up to the encode step in AE 2026 (the TIFF > intermediate renders correctly; the one observed failure was a missing encoder in a system FFmpeg, > which is now pre-flighted before any render starts). Full end-to-end verification is in progress.