Free script · no subscription
Crop to what's
actually there.
Auto-Crop measures your comp across the whole animation, not just the frame you happen to be parked on, and trims it to fit. Nothing gets clipped at 0:12 because you cropped at 0:00.
Free, forever. The account just gives you somewhere to download it from.
Signed in — the download button above is live.
Two-minute install.
Option A — as a dockable panel (recommended)
Download the .jsx file.
Quit After Effects.
Drop the file into the ScriptUI Panels folder:
macOS/Applications/Adobe After Effects <version>/Scripts/ScriptUI Panels
WindowsC:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe After Effects <version>\Support Files\Scripts\ScriptUI Panels
Start After Effects and open the panel from the Window menu, at the bottom of the list.
Dock it anywhere you like — it stays there between sessions.
In a hurry? File → Scripts → Run Script File… and pick the .jsx. Runs once, installs nothing.
The comp is mostly air.
You precomp a badge, an icon, a lower third — and the new comp inherits the size of the whole canvas. Now every render, every nested transform, every blur radius is doing arithmetic on hundreds of pixels of nothing.
Cropping by hand means reading four numbers off the layer, doing the subtraction, and hoping the layer never leaves that box later. It does. It always does. Then the corner clips on the one frame you didn't scrub to.
It reads the motion,
not the moment.
- Animated Bounds
- The crop is the union of where your content sits across the whole animation, not a snapshot of the current frame. A layer that drifts right at 0:12 is inside the box.
- Tight To The Content
- The comp ends up the size of the artwork in it. No hand-measuring, no subtracting anchor points, no "close enough plus twenty pixels".
- Shapes And Text Too
- Shape layers and text layers are measured like everything else, so a comp full of vector work crops as cleanly as one full of footage.
- One Command
- Open the comp, run it, move on. The part you were dreading was never the interesting part of the job.
For every comp that ended up
bigger than the thing inside it.
Precomped Elements
Badges, icons and stingers that inherited the full canvas the moment you precomped them. Crop them down to what they actually are.
Handoff And Export
A comp sized to its content exports to the size someone asked for, instead of the size your canvas happened to be.
Nested Transforms
Scaling or rotating a precomp behaves predictably when the comp is the artwork, rather than the artwork adrift in a field of empty pixels.
Stop measuring. Start cropping.
Auto-Crop is free. Create a MotionPotion account and it's yours, along with the other four free scripts — and everything in Wizard when you're ready for it.
Create your free account → Download Auto-Crop →