Lockdown 2 for After Effects

Important: Ae 2022 was released just a few days ago. For all Ae 2022 users, please go to Composition/Preview and disable “cache frames when idle”. We are working on a fix for this, but when you’re working in the popout menu, After Effects sees that as ‘idle time’ and begins processing in the background. This use of resources will significantly slow down your ability to work in the popout. Disabing this option is the for the best until we can prevent background rendering while in the popout, we’re working on a hotfix.

Quickstart Videos

All tutorials are kept up to date on this homepage, and I list the version number in each tutorial title. The currently released build is Lockdown 2.7.3. If you see tutorials on this page that are from earlier, it simply means that concept and UI has not been updated or changed since that video was released, so the older tutorial is effectively up to date. There are lots of Lockdown tutorials from older versions all across the internet. For those, I’d recommend watching them to learn new generalized concepts, but not following along button by button.

Choosing a Lockdown Frame and setting UVs

To set the frame you’d like to paint or apply graphics to, press the “Set Lockdown Mesh/UV Frame” button. It will create a green bar in the popout timeline. For most projects, this is all you need to know. However for special cases, you can now move these points anywhere using our UV toolset. This is useful if your object is never fully facing the camera, and you want to flatten it out to make it easier to paint on in the stabilized view. Check out the example, UVs are nowhere near as scary as the world would make you think they are.