What is Railcut?
Railcut is a set of editing tools for After Effects. It reads your comp and presents it as a familiar track-based timeline — giving you the keyboard shortcuts, ripple edits, and clip-based workflow you know from Premiere or DaVinci, without leaving AE.
The right mindset
Section titled “The right mindset”Railcut is not editing software that lives inside After Effects. It’s a different way to see and interact with what’s already in your comp.
When you open a comp in Railcut, it translates your AE layers into clips on tracks. When you make edits in Railcut, those are translated back into AE actions — trims, moves, reorders. After Effects is always the source of truth. If you make changes directly in AE and come back to Railcut, it re-reads your comp fresh. That’s by design.
Once you approach it that way, Railcut becomes exactly what it’s meant to be: a faster way to do editorial work inside AE.
What Railcut is great for
Section titled “What Railcut is great for”- Timing captions or text layers to audio — arrange and trim text layers against a waveform in seconds
- Cutting a demo reel or portfolio piece — rough-cut footage in a familiar NLE layout without exporting to Premiere
- Assembly edits — do your rough cut in Railcut, then animate in AE
- Trimming interview or voiceover footage before compositing
- Syncing clips to music — visual waveforms make beat-based cuts fast
- Cutting highlight or social clips entirely inside AE
What Railcut does
Section titled “What Railcut does”- Multi-track timeline — video tracks above, audio tracks below, NLE-style layout
- Drag-and-drop editing — drop footage from the AE Project Panel directly onto the timeline, with snapping to clip edges, playhead, and markers
- Full editing toolset — Selection, Razor Blade, Ripple Edit, Rolling Edit, Slip, Slide, Rate Stretch, Pen, and Zoom tools
- Keyboard shortcuts — Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve, Final Cut Pro, and After Effects layouts, plus fully customizable shortcut editing and custom presets
- Clip thumbnails — generated on supported footage clips
- Audio waveforms — real amplitude waveforms extracted from source audio
- Ripple editing — trim or delete clips and downstream clips shift automatically
- Work area tools — mark in/out points, mark clip (X key), extract/lift ranges
- Label colors — matches AE layer labels; customizable by right-clicking
- Nudge clips — Alt+Arrow moves clips 1 frame; Alt+Shift+Arrow moves 10 frames
- Text layer editing — double-click a text layer to edit its content without leaving Railcut
- Paste Insert — Ctrl+Shift+V inserts clipboard at the playhead, ripple-splitting and shifting downstream clips
What Railcut is not
Section titled “What Railcut is not”Railcut is not a replacement for Premiere Pro or a full NLE inside After Effects. It doesn’t touch your keyframes, effects, or expressions. Use Railcut to trim and arrange footage layers. Use AE for everything else.
System requirements
Section titled “System requirements”- After Effects CC 2021 (v18) or later
- macOS 10.14 (Mojave) or later
- Windows 10 or later
- An internet connection for license activation
Ready to install?
Section titled “Ready to install?”Head to Installation to get Railcut running in After Effects.