None of the jobs Shortcut does are hard. That is the whole point. You can make an adjustment layer, freeze a frame, loop a layer, or hunt for missing footage in After Effects without any plugin at all. You just have to do it again, and again, and again, and each one costs you a right click, a dialog, a drag, and a trim.
Shortcut collapses each of those into one button, sitting in a bar you dock next to your timeline. It is free for every user, with no subscription and no payment, because these are jobs you could already do by hand.
Getting it
Shortcut installs through Filmit Studio, our free desktop app that manages plugins and assets. Download Filmit Studio, create an account, install it, then open After Effects and go to Window, Extensions, Filmit Studio. Your tools appear in the panel, including a free section. Open Shortcut from there.
Dock the panel wherever it suits you and squish it down. It is built to look native to After Effects, so it sits in your workspace without shouting.
The buttons
Adjustment layer
Normally: right click, new adjustment layer, then drag it so it lines up with the layer underneath and trim it so it fits. Not hard, but fussy, and you want it exact.
With Shortcut: select your layer, click the button, and the adjustment layer is created and sized to it. Select two layers and it covers both. Hold Shift and click, and you get one adjustment layer per layer instead of one over the lot.
Un-precompose
You precomposed some layers and now you want them back out in the parent comp. The manual route is to open the precomp, copy the layers, come back out, and paste them.
Shortcut pulls them back out in place with one click, and it keeps the precomp rather than destroying it, so nothing is lost if you still need it.
Freeze frame
After Effects has time freeze frame on the right click menu, and it works. But it freezes the whole layer, and usually what you actually want is for the shot to play and then hold.
Park the playhead where you want the hold, select the layer, click freeze frame. The layer plays up to that point and then holds to the end.
Loop
You have a GIF or a precomp that needs to repeat for the length of the project. Doing it properly means time stretching or keyframing, and neither is fun.
Select the layer, click loop, and it repeats down the timeline with no stutter at the seam.
Wiggle
Wiggle is the most famous expression in After Effects and it is still a trip to the property, alt click, and type. One button applies it to your selection. Frequency and amount are set in settings so it behaves the way you would have written it anyway.
Reverse keyframes
Select two keyframes, click the button, and they flip in time. Doing this by hand means dragging keyframes back and forth trying to land on the exact frames they came from, which is exactly the kind of small annoyance worth removing.
Screenshot
There is no fast way to grab a frame in After Effects. Composition, save frame as, file, then walk through the dialog. Shortcut saves the current frame to disk in one click. The destination path is yours to set in settings.
Quality control
This is the one that earns its dock space before delivery. Click it and Shortcut scans for missing footage, hidden layers, and unassigned layers, and flags what it finds.
On a comp with a thousand layers you may not notice one missing item until it is already in front of a client. The scan is read only, so it tells you what is wrong without moving or deleting anything.
Make the bar yours
Every button has an on and off toggle in settings. If you never reverse keyframes, switch it off and it disappears from the bar. Turn off the ones you do not use and you are left with a small strip of only the buttons you actually reach for.
Settings is also where the defaults live: the screenshot format and destination, and the wiggle frequency and amount.
Why these eight
Every button on the bar came from the same test: is this something an animator does several times on every single project, and does doing it by hand cost more clicks than it should? Adjustment layers, freeze frames, and loops all qualify immediately. So does hunting for missing footage before you send something out.
That test is also why the bar is short. A panel with sixty buttons is a menu, and you already have menus. A small strip of the jobs you repeat constantly is something else, and it only works if it stays small.
It works with the rest of the free tools
Shortcut is not the only thing in Filmit Studio that costs nothing. GIFer, for example, drops animated GIFs straight into your timeline, and it pairs neatly with the loop button: insert a GIF, click loop, and it runs the length of your project without any time stretching.
The free section in Filmit Studio is worth a look on its own. Our effects and transitions run natively on the GPU in After Effects, Premiere Pro, and DaVinci Resolve, so there is a fair amount to try before you ever think about a subscription.
What it leaves in your project
This matters more than it sounds. Shortcut only does things you could have done by hand, so what ends up in the project is ordinary After Effects work: real adjustment layers, real frame holds, real keyframes, real expressions.
Nothing is locked to the plugin. Hand the project to an editor who has never heard of Filmit and it opens and renders exactly the same. That is deliberate, and it is why the tool can be free without any strings attached.
Undo behaves properly
Each shortcut is wrapped in a single undo group in After Effects, so one press of undo puts things back the way they were. A button that creates three layers does not cost you three undos, which is the sort of detail you only notice when it is missing.
If something is off, tell us
There is a contact support option in your profile menu inside Filmit Studio. It takes a general question, a feature request, or a bug report, and it comes straight to us.
Feature requests genuinely shape this tool. Shortcut exists because the team kept doing the same handful of fiddly jobs and decided to stop. If there is one we missed, it is probably worth a button.
It is free, and it is going to grow
Shortcut costs nothing. No subscription, no payment. It arrives in Filmit Studio next to our paid tools, and it needs no account key of its own.
There is deliberately empty space left on the bar. If there is a job you do twenty times a project that is not here yet, tell us in the comments, on Discord, or through a feature request in the panel, and we will look at building it.
