effectcraft/ROADMAP.md

Roadmap

EffectCraft aims to do what After Effects does, with the same panels, menus and behaviour, written from scratch in Rust. This is where it stands. The milestones overlap; several are worked on at once.

	Milestone	State
M0	Skeleton: crates, compositor, the After Effects style shell, control channel, cargo xtask	Done (web build: docs/web.md)
M1	Keyframes: temporal and spatial interpolation, Easy Ease, roving, velocity	Done
M2	Compositing: 38 blend modes, track mattes, parenting, adjustment layers	Done
M3	Project operations: settings dialogs, layer commands, .ecproj, undo, After Effects menu bar	Mostly done
M4	Preview: precomps, motion blur, cached playback	Mostly done
M5	Timeline depth: graph editor, keyframe clipboard and dialogs, time remapping, pick-whips, expression editor	Done
M6	Shapes, masks and footage: shape operators, masks and the pen tool, video and image import	Done
M7	3D: 3D layers, cameras, lights, shadows, depth of field, 3D views and camera tools	In review
M8	Expressions with the After Effects object model	Done
M9	Text and effects: text animators, layer styles, 306 effects (all 298 of After Effects') incl. time and audio effects	Done (range, wiggly and expression selectors, per-character 3D, text on a path)
M10	Export: render queue, H.264, ProRes, image sequences, GIF, audio	Done
M11	Animation tools: audio playback, meters and waveforms, Lottie import and export, presets, Motion Sketch, Wiggler, Smoother	Done
M12	Performance: layer cache, parallel and GPU compositing, disk cache, motion tracking (done); GPU versions of the remaining CPU-only effects	Mostly done
M13	Puppet tools, paint, Roto Brush, motion tracking, a plug-in API, Timeline depth	Done (Roto Brush and face tracking use classical models; learned models are still to come)
M15	The web app (WebAssembly, WebGPU)	Done: browser storage, Web Audio, renders and analyses in Web Workers, viewer frames and GPU effects in frame workers with their own WebGPU devices, the disk cache in the Origin Private File System, a storage manager, offline install (docs/web.md)
M14	Built for agents: MCP server, command-line tool, control channel; Settings, keyboard shortcut editor, auto-save and crash recovery (docs/preferences.md)	Done

How far from full parity

Measured feature by feature in docs/parity.md (4 October 2026):

• ≈ 99% of After Effects' features, weighted by importance, counting partial features as half done (≈ 99.8% with per-feature fractions): 89 of 92 features done, 3 partial, none missing; every essential (P0) feature done; all 306 effects implemented in full, 236 of them on the GPU.
• ≈ 8.5 agent-hours of work remain: about 2–3 hours of wall-clock time with five Claude Opus 5.5 agents in parallel, ≈ 1 hour without learned models for Roto Brush and face tracking.
• What is left: GPU kernels for the remaining visual effects, and learned-model quality for Roto Brush and face tracking.

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