Instant scrubbing
Drag anywhere in the panel and frames follow your cursor. Motion uses a fast proxy that sharpens to full quality the moment you stop. Navigation stays fluid.
After Effects preview panel
Play and wait for your animation
Overdrive is a SCRUB-ORIENTED preview panel for After Effects that renders ahead of your playhead while you think. Instant scrubbing, background render pool, and every frame pixel-identical to your export. Free during beta, macOS.
Work Area (IN/OUT markers, or B/N - I/O keyboard shortcut):
The two blue markers at each end of the timeline strip are IN and OUT points: drag them to define a range, and overdrive plays and renders only that section, perfect for focusing on one part of a long comp. Drag them back to the ends to work on the full comp again.
Free Beta - Mac OS. After Effects 2022 and later | Windows (test mode)
Build 0.3.28
Download overdrive for Mac
macOS, After Effects 2025 and later. A license key is required, you'll get yours by email using the form below.
New: BETA - Windows Build
Download the beta for Windows Now
/!\Windows may be unstable, please report any issues you encounter.
After Effects 2025 and later. A license key is required — get yours with the form on this page.
Beta
Get your free beta licence below
Overdrive is in active development. Beta testers get early builds and a direct line to the developer.
- Early builds, weeks before public releases
- Your feedback lands directly in the roadmap
- Free while the beta lasts
01 - The Problem
You know the wait.
Scrub the timeline and watch the spinner. Change one value and your cache is gone. After Effects renders beautifully but makes you sit through every frame of it, every time.
Overdrive removes the sitting.
02 — How it works
AE renders. Overdrive gets out of the way.
Every frame you see is rendered by the After Effects engine itself, with your third-party effects and 3D layers included. Overdrive replaces the path between that render and your screen.
The panel keeps its own frame cache, renders speculatively ahead of your playhead whenever AE sits idle, and spreads work across background render processes instead of queueing it on the instance you’re working in. When you scrub, the frame is usually already there.
- After Effects renders every frame with your effects and 3D layers.
- Overdrive stores the frames in its own cache and renders ahead of your playhead while AE is idle.
- A pool of background render processes fills the cache in parallel.
- When you scrub, the frame is usually already on screen.
03 — Features
What you get
Renders ahead of you
As soon as a comp is active, Overdrive fills the frames. Jump into another comp, same scenario. Overdrive is unstoppable (except using the pause button)
Before / after in one click
OBSOLETE
Its own timeline
Navigate inside the panel while AE's playhead stays where it is. A running timeline shows which frames are ready, and which ones will be upscaled throug 3 consecutive pass. It never interferes with AE CTI / Timeline.
Less cache, more power
Built in Rust and not C++, Overdrive fill its cache in parallel with a far lighter format and in a fraction of what After Effects can do.
Measured gain
A live readout in the panel shows the actual speedup Overdrive delivers on your comp, measured while you work.
The comparison:
overdrive doesn’t make After Effects render faster. It makes sure you almost never render the same frame twice.
| What you’re doing | After Effects timeline | overdrive |
|---|---|---|
| Re-playing a section you’ve already previewed | Often re-renders it | Instant, served from overdrive’s cache, typically 10-100× faster |
| Previewing right after an edit | Cache invalidated , full re-render on next preview | Keeps playing; changed frames re-render in the background while you keep editing |
| Obsolete | Not possible: one state at a time | — |
| Working on one section of a long comp | Re-renders the work area each time | IN/OUT markers: overdrive renders and caches only that range |
| Playback when frames aren’t ready | Stops | Never stops, plays a draft immediately and sharpens as it catches up (you’ll see “View 1/8 · sharpening…” in the HUD) |
| Reopening a project | Cache is gone, render everything again | Frames come back from disk cache in seconds |
| First-ever preview of a comp (cold start) | One pass, full quality | A playable draft almost immediately, full sharpness progressively. On heavy 3D comps, AE’s first pass is faster, overdrive then reuses AE’s cache within seconds instead of fighting it |
| Your machine while it works | — | Background engines scale to your Mac (RAM and CPU capped automatically), pause when you switch apps or press pause |
The honest fine print
- The very first frame of a comp costs the same as in AE, there is no magic on a cold start.
- On comps with 3D layers, overdrive keeps its background render engines off (they would compete with AE for your GPU) and harvests AE’s own cache instead.
- The image sharpens progressively: you may briefly see a soft draft before full quality. The HUD always tells you the truth about what you’re looking at.
04 — Fidelity
Pixel-identical,
by design.
Because After Effects renders every frame, the image in Overdrive is the image you export. Third-party plugins, expressions, 3D: if AE can render it, Overdrive previews it.
- Third-party plugins
- Expressions
- 3D layers
06 — FAQ
Quick answers
Does Overdrive change my project?
It reads your comp and displays frames. Your project file stays untouched.
Will my third-party effects work?
Yes. AE's engine renders every frame, so anything AE can render, Overdrive previews.
Windows?
Planned. The beta is macOS first.
Is it free?
The beta is. Pricing comes with the release, and beta testers hear about it first.
07 — Contact
Get in touch
A question, a bug, a partnership? Write to us — we reply from contact@pencil-park.com.
- macOS on Apple Silicon | Windows in test
- After Effects 2025 or later
- Beta distributed in English