Some After Effects tasks are not hard, they are just clicky. Re-centering an anchor point that drifted off center. Aligning a layer to the middle of the comp. Dropping in guides to check your framing. Grabbing a quick screenshot of the comp to send a client. Each one only takes a few clicks, but you do them dozens of times a day, and the clicks add up to real time.
ToolKit is the Filmit plugin that collects that daily busywork into one panel for After Effects. I call it the junk drawer, and I mean that with affection, because the junk drawer is the drawer you open most. This guide walks through every tool in the panel (comp screenshots, anchor and alignment tools, scale to comp, and composition guides) following the same flow as the demo video above.
This video may reference an older version of ToolKit. Features and UI may have changed since recording.
What is ToolKit?
ToolKit is a utility panel for After Effects, and After Effects only. Instead of shipping a separate plugin for every small task, we grouped the everyday ones together: capturing screenshots of your comp, fixing anchor points, aligning and scaling layers to the comp, and adding guides like rule of thirds, golden ratio, and safe zones. None of those jobs is big enough to deserve its own product. All of them together absolutely deserve one panel.
Some problems do earn a dedicated tool. TextPilot exists because managing text across a whole After Effects project is a deep problem. The jobs in ToolKit are the opposite: small, constant, and slightly annoying, which is exactly why they belong in one place instead of scattered across menus.
How to install and open ToolKit
ToolKit installs through Filmit Studio, the free companion app for Windows and macOS, alongside the rest of the Filmit plugins included in the suite. Once it is installed, open After Effects and go to Window, then Extensions, then ToolKit. The panel opens right inside After Effects, and the first thing you land on is the Screenshot tab.
Capture comp screenshots that go where you want
I have never loved taking screenshots inside After Effects. The built in route always felt like more steps than the job deserved, so this tab was built to fix that. Pick a custom save path, choose PNG or JPEG, and click Capture Screenshot. That is the whole workflow. Jump back to your comp, frame a different moment, capture again, and every image lands in the folder you chose, ready to send.
The two formats behave differently in a genuinely useful way. If your composition background is set to transparent, the PNG saves with that transparency intact, so you get a clean cutout of exactly what is in the frame. Choose JPEG instead and you get a quality setting plus a solid background in the saved file. In the demo, the PNG came out transparent and the JPEG came out with black behind it, which is exactly the behavior you want when you are sending examples off to clients.
Pro Tip: Set your comp background to transparent before capturing a PNG. ToolKit keeps the transparency, which gives you screenshots you can drop straight onto decks, thumbnails, and mockups without keying anything out.
Fix anchor points and align to comp
Next up is Anchor. Anchor tools show up in a lot of plugins, and that is because they earn their keep. When a layer has an anchor point sitting off center, rotation and scaling stop behaving the way you expect, and fixing it by hand is fiddly. With ToolKit it is a click: select the layer, use the anchor tool, and the anchor is back where it belongs.
Alignment lives right next to it. After Effects does have its own align tools, but I reach for them constantly in the same breath as anchor fixes, so we added align to comp buttons to the panel as well. Snap a layer to the center of the comp, or wherever it needs to sit, without going hunting for the native panel.
Scale to comp: fit and fill
The same set of tools covers scale to comp, and these are quietly excellent. Fit scales a layer up to your comp size. Fill stretches it until it covers the comp completely. Combine them with alignment and placing footage becomes a two click job: center the layer, then fit it to the comp, and it is sitting exactly where it should be. For moving things around quickly, this tab alone justifies the panel.
Pro Tip: Center first, then fit. Centering a layer and then scaling it to the comp is the fastest way to place footage, a logo, or a still exactly full frame, and it works on whatever you have selected.
Guides: rule of thirds, golden ratio, and safe zones
The Guides tab is quick, and it is one of my favorites. Pick a layout (rule of thirds, golden ratio, center cross, safe zones, and so on) and ToolKit drops it into your comp as a non-rendering element inside After Effects. You can frame shots against the overlay all day and never worry about it sneaking into your output. You are good to go the moment you add it.
You can also set the guide color before adding a layout. Pick red, click rule of thirds, and you get bright red guides over your footage. When you are finished framing, Clear All Guides wipes every guide from the comp in one click.
Pro Tip: Choose a guide color that contrasts with your footage before you add the overlay. Red over a dark comp or a bright color over busy footage keeps the lines readable while you frame your shot.
What is coming next
ToolKit is built to keep collecting tools. Coming in a future update are quick render, batch render, and arrange tools. The roadmap is honestly just the inside of my head while I am animating: I will be working on something, a small task will not work quite right, and if the fix is a simple utility rather than a whole product, it goes in the drawer.
If you have a request of your own, the Settings tab points you to everything. Head to Filmit.io to request a feature or get support, or jump into the Filmit Discord and message me directly at max. I respond.
Key takeaways
ToolKit gathers the small, repetitive After Effects jobs into one panel so they stop interrupting the actual work.
Screenshots, anchor fixes, alignment, scaling, and guides without digging through menus.
Capture the comp as PNG or JPEG to a custom folder, with transparency preserved on PNGs.
Re-center off anchor points and align layers to the comp from the same set of tools.
Scale any layer to fit your comp size or fill it edge to edge, then center it in a click.
Rule of thirds, golden ratio, center cross, and safe zones in any color, cleared in one click.
Why I built ToolKit
ToolKit is the plugin version of a list I kept in my head for years. Moving anchor points, aligning layers, dropping in guides, grabbing a screenshot of the comp. I do those things every single day in After Effects, none of them is hard, and every one of them is clickier than it should be. They are not creative decisions. They are friction.
None of those jobs justified a dedicated plugin the way text management justified TextPilot. So we stopped pretending they might and threw them all into one panel instead. A good junk drawer is the most used drawer in the house, and that is the goal here: every small fix one click away, with quick render, batch render, and arrange tools joining the drawer in a future update.
Get started with Filmit
ToolKit installs through Filmit Studio, the free app that manages every Filmit plugin for After Effects and Premiere Pro. One install puts ToolKit in your editor, and the same app keeps it updated.
And if text is the busywork eating your day, pair ToolKit with TextPilot, our text manager for After Effects. It scans your whole project and lets you bulk edit, translate, and spell check from one panel, and the whole suite runs under one subscription, always updated.
