Working in After Effects
Video from After Effects works exactly as it does in Premiere Pro. Transport control does not — what works, what does not, and how to install the bridge.
After Effects gets video from the same Mercury Transmit plugin Premiere Pro uses, so the live picture, the layouts, the safe zones and the frame grab all behave identically. Transport control is the part that differs, and it differs enough to be worth reading before you rely on it.
The short version: video works, transport is partial, and the piece that makes transport work properly ships in no installer and is Windows-only.
Turn it on
Install the plugin as normal — see Install on Windows or Install on macOS. The same binary serves both Adobe hosts.
In After Effects, go to Preferences → Video Preview (Adobe renamed this menu to Settings in the 2025 releases; same item), turn on Mercury Transmit, and tick PreviewMonitor as the device.
Connect the phone. After Effects appears in the app's device list under its own name, with — After Effects appended, because the plugin advertises itself separately per host.
The device list is shared with Premiere Pro's, but the tick is per-application — enabling it in Premiere Pro does not enable it here.
After Effects listens on TCP 47110, not 47100. Premiere Pro and After Effects can run side by side on one machine, each with its own phone, its own log file and its own trusted-device list. The setup window unfortunately prints 47100 on every host; ignore it. See Two hosts on one machine.
What actually reaches the phone
Mercury Transmit is a push interface: the host sends a frame when the displayed frame changes. It is not a pull, and there is no polling.
The practical consequences:
- Scrubbing the timeline, stepping a frame, and running a preview all change the displayed frame, so all of them stream.
- A comp sitting still sends nothing. The phone holds the last frame it received — it is not frozen or disconnected, there is simply nothing new.
- After Effects coalesces viewer redraws within a single main-thread pass, so very rapid changes may arrive as fewer frames than you made.
- Frame rate on the phone tracks whatever After Effects is actually displaying. A comp that previews at 6 fps arrives at 6 fps. This is not the stream throttling — the encoder sends what it is given.
When a phone first connects, the plugin nudges the playhead one frame and back to force a redraw, because otherwise a fresh connection to a static comp shows black until you scrub.
Transport control: what works
This depends entirely on whether PremiereLiveAE.aex is installed. It is not in any installer, so unless you have placed it yourself, you are in the first column.
The phone has five transport buttons, and these are all of them.
| Phone button | No bridge (default) | With PremiereLiveAE.aex |
|---|---|---|
| Play/Pause | Space keystroke. On Windows that goes through SendInput, so After Effects must be foreground; on macOS it is posted into After Effects' own queue, so it is not foreground-gated the same way | Posted directly to After Effects' panel window with the app's active flag flipped first — works even minimized |
| Step back / forward one frame | Sends Premiere Pro's arrow keys — moves the selected layer in time, not the playhead | Real AEGP call, moves the playhead |
| Go to In point / Go to Out point | Sends Premiere Pro's Shift+I / Shift+O — wrong command in After Effects | Real AEGP call — the comp's first frame and its last whole frame |
Without the bridge, frame stepping does not step frames in After Effects — it sends the left and right arrow keys, which shift the selected layer one frame in time inside the composition. The playhead does not move, so nothing re-renders and the picture on the phone is identical: there is no sign it happened, and Undo is the only way back. Deselect all layers before touching the phone's transport bar in After Effects, or install the bridge.
There are no shuttle buttons. The app declares five transport commands and none of them is a shuttle, so no shipping build can send a shuttle command to any host — this is not an After Effects limitation. Shuttle exists as reserved opcodes in the wire protocol and nothing else.
Audio does not work in After Effects at all. There is no audio path on the After Effects side of the plugin — nothing to enable, no setting that changes it, on either platform and on either tier. The phone cannot tell, either: the speaker button stays in its ordinary state rather than turning orange, so it looks like a working mute toggle and delivers permanent silence. See No audio.
Installing the bridge
PremiereLiveAE.aex is an AEGP plugin that drives the After Effects timeline through the real SDK instead of synthetic keystrokes. It ships in no installer, because its install path is After Effects-version-specific and would need registry detection to place correctly.
Windows only. The bridge is not built on macOS at all — the build is guarded on Windows. On macOS After Effects there is no bridge to install and every transport control falls back to synthetic keystrokes.
The default location, matching where a source build installs it:
C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe After Effects 2026\Support Files\Plug-ins\PremiereLive\PremiereLiveAE.aexCreate a PremiereLive folder inside After Effects' Plug-ins directory. After Effects scans subfolders, so the nesting is fine and keeps the file identifiable.
Copy PremiereLiveAE.aex into it. Substitute your After Effects year in the path — 2025, 2024 — if you are not on 2026.
Restart After Effects. The bridge is picked up at startup, and the plugin detects it in-process the first time a transport command arrives.
The PremiereLive subfolder is optional — After Effects recurses — but it makes the file obvious to whoever uninstalls next.
With the bridge loaded, play/pause reaches After Effects even when it is minimized: the plugin flips the application's active flag and then posts the Space keystroke to its panel window queue, rather than injecting it into the system input queue. Frame stepping and the two jump buttons use AEGP_SetItemCurrentTime on the front comp, clamped to the comp duration, and do not care about focus at all. Nothing on this path needs After Effects in front.
Recommended settings
Nothing in the encoder path is After Effects-specific — the same Resolution Limit, codec and GOP controls apply, and the same trade-offs. Two adjustments are worth making for compositing work:
- Resolution Limit: Source, if you are on macOS or judging detail. On Windows, everything below Source goes through a nearest-neighbor downscale, which aliases fine detail — see Judging picture on the phone for the full explanation.
- GOP Mode: All-Intra, if you are stepping frame by frame rather than previewing. Every frame becomes independent, so a single frame you step to arrives complete instead of depending on frames that were never sent. The default is Long, which is right for continuous preview playback.
Transparency is worth knowing about: After Effects hands the plugin straight-alpha BGRA, and the plugin mattes it over black before encoding. A comp with no background layer shows on the phone the way it shows in the After Effects viewer with the transparency grid off — composited onto black, not checkerboarded. See Picture and color.
What to do instead of transport
Given the state of transport, the workflow most After Effects users end up with is: drive the timeline from the keyboard as normal, and treat the phone as a passive monitor. That is the part of the product that works completely.
If you want the phone to drive playback, Premiere Pro is where that is properly supported — the Control Surface plugin ships in both installers and uses Premiere Pro's real SDK. See Transport control.
Related
- Enable in After Effects — the setup path in detail
- Transport control — how transport works on both hosts
- Two hosts on one machine — running Premiere Pro and After Effects together
- Transport does nothing — diagnosing an unresponsive transport bar
- Limits — everything the product does not do
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