Show HN: I created an After Effects alternative

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This is from my point of view as an experienced developer and VFX artist, including in-depth knowledge of AE.

    A 30fps limit is surprising
    23.976 as an fps does not seem to be dealt with gracefully
    Clicking report bug should take me to a bug report form with info
    Interacting with "rectangle" is surprising because the corners aren't draggable. Probably should default to full size
    I should be able to wind input fields by clicking and dragging on them, such as for rotation
    When I drag keys around in the dope sheet, and let go with momentum, they appear to keep moving and "settle" in a sort of random place. They should not do that
    I see that this momentum behavior is also in the play head in the timeline. It really should not do that.
    Putting in a value in the dope sheet should be enabled, and it should automatically set a key
    I liked the visualizations of the easing, but it should probably be communicated with the keyframe's icon shape in the dope sheet like it does in AE.
    It is difficult to move a key to the beginning of the timeline.
    Architecturally, the preview rendering probably has to work the way it does in After Effects. Guaranteeing a real time visualization is pretty important.

I kind of stopped there because it's a bunch of goal-less fiddling. This is really great, there is a tremendous amount of product development. Hopefully you will think deeply about your audience and objectives, and the amount of product development that goes into After Effects.

I (Firefox developer working on anything media related) got in contact with the dev on Twitter, and he told me that Web Codecs was missing (and we're shipping this in a month or so, it's been in Nightly for some time), and something to save project file to disk (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/show...).

So I spoofed the user-agent in a nightly build here on my Linux desktop workstation, then had to alias one method that we should have implemented years ago but only have with a `moz` prefix (`HTMLMediaElement.mozCaptureStream`). This is on us to fix.

Then it looks like a worker script is served with the `Content-Type` `text/html` instead of `application/javascript` or something like that. We also have a pref flip to bypass that check, so I did that, but this is on the dev to fix.

When you do this it works, I've loaded project demos containing videos, audio, various things composited on top, scrubbed the timeline aggressively in a debug build, moved things around in various bits of the interface and also in the rendering frame, etc., things seem to work as they should, perf is as I'd expect it to be (and again, I'm running it in a debug build with optimizations disabled for anything media related, enabled for other parts of the browser).

What's missing is `window.showSaveFilePicker` and file system related stuff. It's possible to use https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/File_System... instead (that we ship, e.g. Photoshop on the Web uses it). We think that it's much less scary than giving access to the file system to a content process of a Web browser. Maybe because videos can sometimes be extremely big files, direct access to the FS could be of use there. Thankfully, we also ship extremely modern video encoders to make them tiny instead, but that's currently a limitation Firefox has, for better or worse.

https://paul.cx/public/pikimov-firefox-nightly.webm

Thank you for your feedback, the 30fps limit is temporary, until I have fully tested perfs with video files at a higher framerate can you tell me more about 'and let go with momentum', not sure what you mean? Is it about loss of precision, not being responsive, bad snapping to closest frame?

I had previous experience doing editors, and I am not ashamed to admit ChatGPT gave me a hand on some features I was not comfortable with, like editing audio in javascritt for example.