Rio Panels — One-click tools & motion for After Effects

The problem

Editing in After Effects is death by a thousand clicks — right-click menus, memorized shortcuts, the same setup steps on every comp.

What I got wrong

The first build crammed everything into one do-everything panel with too many options. Powerful, but nobody could learn it at a glance.

What changed

I split it into two focused panels — one for workflow actions, one for motion — each laid out so the button you want is where you'd expect it, with hover and click feedback so it feels responsive.

Two panels

One for the work. One for the motion.

Both ship as a single self-contained .jsx that docks as a ScriptUI panel or runs as a floating palette — same file, either way.

Rio Tools · v1.0

Rio Tools

The common moves — align, pre-comp, create, fit, freeze, effects, render — grouped by task and reduced to one click each.

AlignCreateModifyEffectsExport

Rio Flow · v3.1

Rio Flow

Easing presets you apply to keyframes in a click — ease, quad, expo, back, bounce, overshoot — plus a live curve preview and a custom curve builder.

15 presetsLive curveCustomEasy EaseLinearize

Inside Rio Tools

Five sections, one click each.

Every action runs inside a single undo group, so Cmd/Ctrl + Z always backs it out cleanly.

Align9 buttons

A 3×3 grid — top/middle/bottom × left/center/right. Reads anchor point and scale to land the layer correctly, in both 2D and 3D. Center In Comp is tinted to stand out.

Create7 buttons

Solid, shape, text, null, camera, point light, adjustment layer — added straight to the active comp through native AE scripting, no extra dialogs.

Modify6 buttons

Pre-Comp, Center, Fit To Comp, Mirror, Freeze Frame (hold keyframes via time-remap), and Enable Motion Blur on both the layer and the comp switch.

Effects12 buttons

Lumetri, Curves, Hue/Sat, Levels, Brightness, Tint, Fill, Glow, Drop Shadow, Gaussian & Lens Blur, Keylight — each applied by its exact internal matchName.

Export1 button

Save Current Frame drops a render-queue item at the playhead — ready to render with one more click from the queue.

Retheme~line 55

One C{} colour block and named BTN_*_H height constants up top. Change the look without touching a line of logic.

Inside Rio Flow

Pick a curve. Watch it draw.

A live ScriptUI canvas redraws a bezier approximation of the selected preset on every click — a graph-editor feel within ScriptUI's limits.

15 presets

Tuned speed + influence pairs: standard eases, polynomial curves (quad / cubic / expo), anticipation (back in/out, overshoot), and character presets — Bounce-ish, Smooth Pop, Snappy.

Live preview

The curve canvas draws handle arms, a linear reference diagonal, and grid lines, then repaints the moment you switch presets.

Custom curve

Dial in name, in/out influence and speed, then Save Preset to add it as a new button for the session.

Utilities

Easy Ease, Linearize, Copy Current Settings, and Reset Fields — the small moves you reach for between every keyframe pass.

Install

Drop in, restart, dock.

Both panels install the same way. Save the file, copy it into the ScriptUI Panels folder, restart After Effects.

macOSScriptUI Panels

# Applications → After Effects [ver]
Scripts/ScriptUI Panels/
   Rio_Tools.jsx
   Rio_Flow.jsx

WindowsScriptUI Panels

# Program Files → Adobe → After Effects [ver]
Support Files/Scripts/ScriptUI Panels/
   Rio_Tools.jsx
   Rio_Flow.jsx

Download Rio_Tools.jsx and Rio_Flow.jsx from the repo.
Copy them into the ScriptUI Panels folder shown above.
Restart After Effects.
Open from Window > Rio_Tools.jsx or Window > Rio_Flow.jsx, then dock anywhere.

First run blocked? In After Effects → Preferences → Scripting & Expressions, enable “Allow Scripts to Write Files and Access Network.”

Field notes

Building my own panels showed me most of my creative block was just friction. Remove the clicks and the work starts moving on its own.

— Rio

Get the panels ↗