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, 259 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 (done); presets, Motion Sketch, Wiggler	In progress
M12	Performance: layer cache and parallel compositing (done), GPU compositing, disk cache, motion tracking	In progress
M13+	Puppet, paint, roto, motion tracking, a plugin API	Planned
M15	The web app (WebAssembly, WebGPU)	Done, single-threaded
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 (2 October 2026):

• ≈ 70% of After Effects' features, weighted by importance (78% of the essentials, 56% of professional daily-use features, 17% of the long tail); 257 of 298 effects.
• ≈ 141 agent-hours of work remain by the audit's estimate. With five Claude Opus 5.5 agents working in parallel that is ≈ 12–15 hours of wall-clock time at the pace measured so far, and up to ≈ 35–40 hours if the audit's conservative per-feature figures hold (see the calibration note in docs/parity.md).
• Hardest remaining pieces: on-canvas text editing, GPU rendering, tracking and roto, Advanced 3D.

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