effectcraft/ROADMAP.md

EffectCraft Roadmap

Stage: alpha · next: beta, ~30 points of "ready for real work" and ~350–620 h away

Last reviewed: 2026-10-12 · Last updated: 2026-10-12 · Change: minor (open-issue count, crash list and localization share re-audited against upstream/main 470ea7a3) · Target: Adobe After Effects 2026 (26.5.0.89)

EffectCraft aims to do what After Effects does, with the same panels, menus and behaviour, written from scratch in Rust. This page is the one-page summary; the evidence is in docs/target-app-parity.md, the work list in docs/gaps.md, and the plan in docs/roadmap.md.

Headline numbers

	Value	Kind
Feature breadth	≈ 91%	Estimated, weighted by area; the self-graded 92-item checklist says ≈ 99%
Ready for real work	≈ 45% (40–50%)	Estimated; one live fidelity measurement so far
Mainstream practitioner	≈ 47%	Estimated: the typical motion designer's weekly work (how)
Essentials user	≈ 52%	Estimated: core features only (how)
Remaining to beta	≈ 350–620 Opus 5.5 agent-hours	Estimated
Remaining to full parity	≈ 850–1,500 Opus 5.5 agent-hours	Estimated; ≈ 70% parallelises

Audience	Ready %	Hours to ~95%	Work that dominates
Full target	≈ 45%	≈ 850–1,500 h	.aep, fidelity corpus, bug backlog, performance, formats, hardware, localization
Mainstream practitioner	≈ 47%	≈ 280–530 h	.aep exchange, stability, everyday fidelity and bugs, preview speed
Essentials user	≈ 52%	≈ 150–300 h	Opening tutorial .aep files, start-up stability, core bugs, preview with sound

About 60–70% of these hours parallelise (detail).

Hours are one Opus 5.5 agent working sequentially, calibrated on this repository's history (how).

Stage

Alpha, because all six core workflows of the alpha gate (set up, animate, text and shapes, composite, preview, save and deliver) work end to end on macOS and the work saves and reopens, and ready for real work (≈ 45%) is above the ≈ 40% bar. But: After Effects projects (.aep) can't be opened, which alone rules out beta; fidelity against After Effects is measured for one narrow case (scalar ease, 168 samples); 216 issues are open on 12 October, six of them crash reports (#580, #501, #426, #341, #234, #879). Beta needs ≈ 75% ready and .aep opening reliably: the .aep owner decision and importer (80–160 h), the fidelity harness and P0/P1 corpus (60–100 h), the crash and bug backlog (40–80 h), performance (40–70 h), Linux/Windows reliability (30–50 h) and depth in animation, masks, effects and text (100–160 h).

By dimension

Dimension	%	Hours	Doc
Features: breadth	91%	—	target-app-parity.md
Features: ready for real work	50%	360–660	target-app-parity.md
UI/UX fidelity	65%	60–120	ui-parity.md
File formats	50%	130–230	file-format-parity.md
Hardware	40%	60–120	hardware-parity.md
Localization	18%	60–110 + review	localization-parity.md
Performance	35%	50–100	gaps.md
Stability	45%	40–80	gaps.md
Platforms	65%	30–60	gaps.md
Ecosystem and plug-ins	20%	40–80	plugins.md, scripting-parity.md
AI features	35%	40–80	gaps.md
Agent control (beyond After Effects)	ahead	—	agents.md

Features

Area	Breadth	Ready	Hours
Project, footage and import	92%	55%	25–45
Compositions, layers and compositing	98%	60%	30–55
Animation: keyframes, graph editor, motion paths, puppet	97%	55%	35–60
Expressions and scripting (detail)	93%	65%	20–40
Shapes, masks and roto	93%	45%	30–50
Text and typography	94%	50%	20–35
Effects and animation presets (detail)	85%	40%	70–130
3D (Classic and Advanced)	82%	35%	35–65
Tracking and AI-assisted tools	80%	35%	35–70
Preview and cache	92%	40%	25–50
Render queue and export	85%	55%	25–45
Audio	85%	45%	6–12

Weights and evidence per row: target-app-parity.md.

Languages

UI strings translated out of ≈ 3,900 (detail: localization-parity.md).

Language	Status	%
English	full	100%
Simplified Chinese	partial (menus, part of the panels)	29%
Spanish	menus only	16%
Hindi	none	0%
Arabic	none	0%
French	menus only	16%
Portuguese (Brazil)	partial (menus, part of the panels)	26%
Indonesian	none	0%
Japanese	partial (menus, part of the panels)	27%
German	menus only	16%
Korean	none	0%
Vietnamese	none	0%

Also shipped: Traditional Chinese (partial, 29%), Ukrainian (partial, 29%), Czech (partial, 29%) and Russian (menus only, 16%). No language has had native-speaker review.

Upcoming

Ranked; detail in docs/roadmap.md and docs/gaps.md.

	Next	Hours
1	Fix the open crash reports; run cargo xtask ci on every pull request (G3)	15–30
2	Fidelity harness against After Effects: rendered frames, a corpus case per P0/P1 feature (G1)	60–100
3	Real-user reliability on Linux and Windows; the open mask, effect, text and 3D bugs (G2)	100–190
4	.aep / .aepx import, after the owner's clean-room decision (G4)	80–160
5	Performance: benchmarks at 1080p / 4K, real-time cached playback, hardware video (G5)	50–100
6	Localization depth: effect names, all panels, Korean / Italian (G9)	60–110

Come tell us what matters most to you on Discord.

Progress log

• 2026-10-12: Roto Brush span edits report strokes outside a trimmed layer without panicking; strokes and undo history are preserved so restoring the timing allows the span edit again.

• 2026-10-11: Ukrainian panels caught up with the Chinese catalogs. The 95 rows the panel catalog gained since 9 October are translated: the Home screen (recent files, their Kind and Opened columns, the empty and no-match states), the viewer's toolbar tooltips, magnification, resolution, grid, channel and Fast Previews popups, the Appearance settings, the solid dialog and the project, import, export and colour-management forms. uk now carries 495 of the 496 panel rows — RGB reads the same in Ukrainian, so it falls back to the English source by design — alongside its 618/618 menus.

• 2026-10-10: Full parity re-measure against After Effects 2026 26.5 (installed bundle, 26.2–26.5 release notes, repository counts): breadth ≈ 91%, ready ≈ 45%, stage alpha. Progress docs follow the shared standard: docs/parity.md became docs/target-app-parity.md; new docs/roadmap.md, localization-parity.md, file-format-parity.md, hardware-parity.md, ui-parity.md, effects-parity.md and scripting-parity.md.

• 2026-10-10: Spanish (#460) and Brazilian Portuguese (#217) menu translations.

• 2026-10-10: Japanese now translates the interface below the menu bar too: crates/ui-egui/src/i18n/ui.rs has a Japanese table with the same 396 rows as the Chinese ones (panels, dialogs, buttons and tooltips; the shape test keeps the three catalogs listing the same source strings). Menus were already Japanese.

• 2026-10-09: Ukrainian now covers all 396 current panel-catalog strings, including dialogs, buttons and tooltips, alongside its menu translation. The catalog keeps the same source keys and placeholder counts as the Chinese catalogs; missing or engine-generated text still falls back to English.

• UI.6: Viewer breadcrumbs use theme colors for readable active text. The bottom control row scrolls horizontally at compact widths; keyboard focus reveals the selected control while dropdowns, exposure adjustments and snapshot holds retain their behavior.

• UI.3: Shared docking transactions and pointer targets now handle panel moves, splits, tab ordering and floating groups, preserving accordion metadata and the saved workspace schema. Dock dividers use bounded shared geometry and keyboard-accessible resize handles. Tiny layouts no longer reach an invalid floating-point clamp; workspace trees and saved layouts are retained.

• 2026-10-09: Settings ▸ General ▸ Language now translates the interface below the menu bar as well: panels, dialogs, buttons and tooltips read their text through crates/ui-egui/src/i18n/ui.rs, keyed by the English source string. Simplified and Traditional Chinese are complete (384 strings); Japanese rows can follow in the same file. A test fails when a converted panel gains a hard-coded string, and another keeps the catalog free of unused rows.

• 2026-10-08: effectcraft-cli render --out resolves a relative path against the working directory, like --project (it used the project's folder, which doubled a path that already named it). Render Queue outputs set in a project are unchanged.

• 2026-10-08: Long-press a grouped toolbar button to choose its tools, including Horizontal/Vertical Type; releasing the hold keeps the menu open. Existing point/paragraph text creation is unchanged.

• 2026-10-06: Settings ▸ General ▸ Language persists English/Japanese menu labels (general.language); native UI reuses installed Japanese font fallback, with no bundled CJK font. Dialog and panel contents remain English.

• 2026-10-05: Honest assessment (docs/gaps.md): breadth ≈ 99% by our own checklist, real use ≈ 30–50%; workstreams G1–G9.

• 2026-10-04: Checklist audit at d39c0e8: 89 done / 3 partial / 0 missing of 92 features.

• 2026-10-01: First commit.

Revision history

Date	Change	Summary
2026-10-12	minor	Open-issue count (134 to 216), crash list and localization share (12% to 18%) updated to match docs/gaps.md
2026-10-12	patch	Roto Brush span validation after trimming; command regressions for both layer edges
2026-10-10	minor	Hours to ≈ 95% for each audience
2026-10-10	minor	Headline adds mainstream practitioner (≈ 47%) and essentials user (≈ 52%)
2026-10-10	minor	Stage checked against the new core-workflow gate (all six pass; still alpha)
2026-10-10	major	Rewritten to the shared progress-docs standard: stage, two numbers, dimensions, features, languages, upcoming, progress log; milestones moved to docs/roadmap.md
2026-10-05	major	Two numbers (breadth vs real use) and workstreams G1–G9