EffectCraft: What It Is, How to Install It, and the AI Route | CircleAIDance

EffectCraft is a free, open-source motion graphics and visual effects application from the ArtCraft team: a clean-room rebuild of a professional compositor, written in Rust, and young — its first commit landed on 1 October 2026. CircleAIDance is not affiliated with EffectCraft or ArtCraft, and this page is not a review of it — it collects what the project's own site and repository state, points only at their official download pages, and describes the browser-based AI route we publish for moving shots.

What is EffectCraft?

EffectCraft is a compositor for animated titles, motion graphics, and visual effects work: you build a composition out of layers, animate their properties with keyframes, stack effects on them, and render the result. The panels and shortcuts follow the familiar layout — Project, Composition, Timeline, Effect Controls, Properties, Effects & Presets, Character, Align, Preview, Audio, Render Queue — so the muscle memory transfers on day one.

What is inside, per the project's own pages:

• Layers of every kind — solids, shapes, text, footage, nested compositions, nulls, adjustment layers, cameras, and lights; parenting, track mattes, 38 blend modes, and motion blur.
• Keyframes that behave as expected — linear, Bezier, hold, auto and continuous Bezier, roving keys, Easy Ease (F9), and a Graph Editor with value and speed graphs.
• Hundreds of built-in effects — blur, colour correction, distortion, generators, keying, particles and simulation, stylize, and time effects, edited in Effect Controls.
• Real 3D — 3D layers with cameras, depth of field, and lights that cast soft ray-traced shadows, with orbit, pan, and dolly tools.
• Expressions — JavaScript expressions with wiggle, loops, and layer references, edited inline and linked to any property.
• Export anywhere — H.264 and ProRes with alpha, PNG, TIFF, and 32-bit EXR sequences, GIF, and Lottie import and export built in (no plugin), with no FFmpeg inside — the codecs are the project's own.

Two design choices stand out from the usual tooling. Projects are saved as .ecproj, readable versioned JSON, so they diff cleanly in version control. And every menu item, timeline drag, and property edit goes through one command registry, so the same actions are reachable from the command line, a JSON control channel, and an MCP server for agents.

If you arrived searching for "EffectCraft AI": this is not a generative video model, and the project does not present it as one. The only named models are on-device helpers — Roto Brush can use MobileSAM (an optional 40 MB download in Settings ▸ Roto Brush) and face tracking can use Google's MediaPipe Face Landmarker (an optional 3.8 MB download in Settings ▸ Face Tracking). Both run locally, and the project states there is no telemetry and no network access unless you ask for it. Generating footage from a prompt is not part of what it does.

Where to install EffectCraft (official)

Two official sources, and the only ones this page links to:

• The EffectCraft page on getartcraft.com — the recommended route, offering the ArtCraft Launcher (version 0.3.2 at the time of writing) or a standalone download (version 0.8.0 at the time of writing).
• The project's GitHub releases — every build, with checksums in SHA256SUMS.txt.

It is free and open source under MIT / Apache-2.0, on macOS (signed and notarized), Windows (code-signed installers), Linux (AppImage, Flatpak, .deb, .rpm, tarball, and a RISC-V tarball), FreeBSD, and the browser. If a page asks you to pay for EffectCraft, it is not the project.

One install-day note from the project's own instructions: on Linux under native Wayland, drag-and-drop into the window does not deliver events yet, so import with File ▸ Import ▸ File… (it accepts multiple files), or run the app under XWayland.

Your first composition, step by step

A short walkthrough of the core loop, using the panels the app ships with:

1. Make a composition. Create a new composition and set its dimensions and frame rate — this is your canvas and clock. Everything downstream is timed against it.
2. Import your media. Bring in footage, images, or audio with File ▸ Import ▸ File…, then drag what you need from the Project panel into the Timeline.
3. Build the stack. Add layers — a solid or shape as a backdrop, text for a title, footage as the base — and arrange them in the Timeline. Adjustment layers change everything beneath them, so keep one at the top for a global grade.
4. Animate a property. Park the playhead where the move starts, change a property (position, scale, opacity), and the app sets a keyframe; move the playhead and change it again. F9 eases the pair. For anything with a beat, open the Graph Editor and shape the value and speed curves.
5. Stack an effect. Pull something from Effects & Presets onto a layer — a blur, a grade, a distortion — and tune it in Effect Controls. Effects render in order, so the stack reads top to bottom.
6. Render. Add the composition to the Render Queue and pick a format: H.264 or ProRes for delivery, PNG, TIFF, or 32-bit EXR sequences for further work, GIF for the web, or a Lottie file for app and web animation. Finished renders land where you point the queue.

Two habits worth forming early: keep the project as .ecproj under version control so every change is a readable diff, and drive repeated chores — batch renders, template variations — through the command line or the MCP server instead of clicking them again.

EffectCraft and After Effects: where it stands

The project describes itself as a clean-room reimplementation of After Effects, built from public documentation and observed behaviour, never from Adobe's files, icons, presets, or code. The comparison, as its own documents draw it:

• What carries over. The panels, menus, and keyframe behaviour follow After Effects closely, and the project says nearly every After Effects feature exists in some form — including the full effect set, expressions, 3D cameras and lights, and a render queue.
• Where it stands today. Alpha. EffectCraft cannot open .aep or .aepx project files, and After Effects plug-ins do not run. The project estimates roughly 91% of After Effects' features exist, but puts itself around 45% of the way to replacing it for professional work, and says it "isn't yet a replacement for After Effects on client work." Render behaviour is not yet compared against After Effects automatically; macOS is the most tested platform, with Linux and Windows interaction bugs being fixed first.

So: a fast-moving free tool that is already usable for experimenting and personal projects, from a team that publishes exactly where it falls short — and not yet the thing you bill client work through.

The AI route: a moving shot without a timeline

If what you want is a moving shot rather than a timeline to build — a still that breathes, a portrait that turns, a scene with one camera move and sound — CircleAIDance publishes that as image-to-video. You bring one reference image, describe the motion, camera, and audio in the prompt, and Veo 3.1 renders a clip with synchronized native audio: dialogue, ambience, and effects arrive with the picture. Clips come out at 720p or 1080p, 6 or 8 seconds, at 16:9 or 9:16, and 6- and 8-second clips cost the same. The cheapest single run is Veo 3.1 Lite at 720p for 30 credits; the Fast tier is 60 credits at 720p and 65 at 1080p. The composer shows the exact estimate before a run starts.

Both limits stated plainly: every run needs that reference image — the workflow is image-to-video, not text-to-video — and there is no free tier, so every run bills. Rates and details live on the Veo 3.1 model page and pricing.

Keep reading

• PhotoCraft — the same team's open-source image editor: what it does, where its official downloads live, and the browser AI route for photo edits.
• AI zombie love story videos — the two-photo video trend built on one hard cut, with prompts you can paste.