Getting started

Install Cue, open the panel in After Effects, sign in, and make your first request. Takes about five minutes.

Cue is a chat panel that lives inside After Effects. You tell it what you want in plain words, and it builds the real thing in your open project: layers, keyframes, effects, expressions, text and shapes you can grab and edit like anything you made yourself.

This page gets you from download to your first animation.

What you need

After Effects 2024 (24.0) or newer
macOS 14 Sonoma or newer (Apple silicon or Intel), or Windows 10 or 11 (64-bit)
An internet connection while you use the panel

You don’t need a card to start. New accounts get 300 free credits, which is about 10 builds or a couple of tutorials.

1. Install

Go to the download page. It picks your operating system for you; both installers are always listed.
Open the file you downloaded and follow the installer. On a Mac it’s a standard installer package; on Windows it’s a regular setup program.
If After Effects is open, quit it and open it again. Extensions are only picked up when After Effects starts.

That’s the whole install. There’s nothing to configure and no settings to change in After Effects.

2. Open the panel

In After Effects, choose Window ▸ Extensions ▸ Cue.

The panel opens as a normal After Effects panel. You can dock it next to your Timeline or Effect Controls like any other panel, and After Effects remembers where you put it.

If you don’t see it in the menu, see Troubleshooting.

The first time you open the panel it asks you to sign in. Pick one:

Continue with Google. Your browser opens, you pick your Google account, and the panel signs in by itself. You can close the browser tab afterwards.
Email code. Type your email address, and we send you a 6-digit code. Type the code into the panel. Codes expire after 10 minutes; ask for a new one if it’s late.

You stay signed in on that computer until you sign out.

4. Make your first request

Open a project with a composition, or make a new comp with a text layer in it. Then type something into the panel, for example:

Make the text fade in over the first second and slide up a little as it does.

Press Enter. You’ll see the panel describe what it’s doing as it works (“Adding opacity keyframes…”). When it’s finished, scrub the timeline or press the spacebar. The keyframes are real; select the layer and press U to see them.

Don’t like it? Press Cmd+Z (Mac) or Ctrl+Z (Windows) once, and the whole change is gone. Or just tell it what to change: “slower”, “no slide, only the fade”.

Where to go next