After Effects Keyframe Shortcuts - Motion Design School (2024)

Vladimir LiubarskiyBlog Editor, Motion Designer & Tutor

Useless keyframes, tedious routines and rendering glitches (among others) are, quite literally, a headache. Besides, these nifty little things can slow you down in ways you don’t even realize. Now, the question is, how can you speed up your workflow in AE?

While there are several ways, After Effects hotkeys are definitely a great way to go about this. They’ll help you work faster and keep you from getting stuck looking for that buried panel. Bottom line: they simply rock!

Markers can help you set a reference point, so you can track your animation’s timings and progression. A good example is being able to sync your animation to music. Wondering how to add a marker in After Effects? For Mac OS, simply hit Control + 8 on the main keyboard. Or you could use * (multiply) on the numpad for both Windows and Mac OS.

Once you set a marker, you can double click on it to add comments, links, etc. To remove a marker, simply Command-click on it.

If you’re working with external projects (say, an outro template for YouTube videos), then it’s very likely that some layers were left locked. Instead of unlocking each layer one-by-one, simply hit Command + Shift + L to unlock all layers.

On the flip side, you can lock all (selected) layers with Command + L if you want to leave them untouched.

Did you know you can replace assets for selected layers in your timeline? This is a lifesaver when you have a pre-comp or asset in your timeline but you want to want to swap it out for another one. Instead of deleting the layer, the replace layer After Effects shortcut helps you simply replace the containing assets.

To do this, select a layer in your timeline, hold down the Option key, select an item in your project panel and replace by dragging the source item from the Project panel onto the selected layer.

Precomposing layers allows you to arrange your work—or layers, specifically—as you see fit, so you spend less time looking for your project’s resources.

Precomposing is like organizing layers into folders. To precompose selected layers, simply hit Command + Shift + C.

It can get tedious, clicking on the diamond icon or stopwatch spacebar every time you want to add a keyframe. Thankfully, there’s this easy “add a keyframe” shortcut After Effectsshipswith.

To add a keyframe shortcut in After Effects, simply hit Option with the corresponding shortcut for Anchor Point, Position, Scale, Rotation and Opacity.

Note:You can use the same keyboard shortcuts to remove a selected keyframe.

In After Effects, Easy Ease helps you automatically adjust the speed of a keyframe. Instead of calling up the Graph Editor every time you want to “Easily” Ease, you can simply use their shortcuts. You can apply Easy Ease (which lets you ease the speed coming both into and out of selected keyframes) by pressing F9.

To ease the speed when coming into a keyframe (i.e, Easy Ease In), hit Shift + F9. Similarly, to apply Easy Ease Out, press Command + Shift + F9.

To show all keyframes in After Effects for a selected layer and their location in the timeline, hitU. Next, press Command + Option + A to select all keyframes After Effects has shown.

Also, you can select all keyframes for a property by clicking the property name in the timeline. Let’s say you wanted to select all keyframes for Scale, all you have to do is click on “Scale”.