Inspect Mode and Rendering

Inspect mode reads an After Effects project and shows you what is inside it — which compositions exist and which layers you can change. Once you know what is editable, you render a composition to video with your edits applied.

Add the project

1. Drag an .aep (or .aepx) file onto a board, or place one from the media panel.
2. It appears as an After Effects element with the project’s name.

The app checks for a local After Effects installation. If none is found, the element shows that rendering is unavailable — install After Effects and reopen the app.

Enable inspect mode

Open the project element and choose Inspect. The app opens the project headlessly and reads its structure, returning:

• Compositions — every comp in the project, so you can pick which one to render.
• Editable layers in the chosen composition:
• Text layers — the source text you can replace.
• Media / footage layers — the images and videos you can swap for other files (including media already on your board).
• Expressions — layer expressions you can override.

Inspect does not change anything. It only reads the project so the editor can show you the fields that are safe to edit.

Render

With a composition selected, set your inputs and render:

• Text edits — replace the copy in named text layers.
• Media edits — point footage layers at new files; board media works directly.
• Expression edits — override expressions on specific layers.
• Add layers — drop in extra image or video layers where the template allows.
• Output settings — composition, width, height, fps, and output format (defaults follow the comp).

Click Render. The app applies your edits to a copy of the project, renders the composition with After Effects’ own renderer, and places the finished video back on the board. The original .aep is left untouched.

Renders run on your machine and take as long as After Effects needs — complex comps are slower. A longer render can run as a background job so you can keep working while it finishes.

Save a preset

If you will re-render the same project with the same kind of inputs, save the configuration as a preset on that element. Presets store the composition and the set of edits under a name, so you can render again — or have an agent render — without rebuilding the setup. See Agentic Rendering.

Tips

• After Effects cannot auto-fit replacement media to a layer’s original size. If a swapped image looks wrong, match the replacement’s aspect ratio to the layer it replaces.
• Keep templates tidy: clear text-layer names and clearly named footage layers make both manual and agentic rendering far more reliable.

Where to go next

• Agentic Rendering
• After Effects overview