Carousels, G Transition and the dependency map: how the big tools work

Most of Quickbar Pro saves a few clicks. The tools in this article save hours. A carousel with eighty styles, or a transition with eighty-seven presets, would take a long time to build by hand. Each one creates a full setup for you, and leaves the settings open so you can change them later.

This article explains how the big tools work, what they build in your project, and how to get the most from them.

Carousel Pro lives in Graph, under the Carousel sub-tab. It has eighty styles. Each style sets the position, rotation, scale and opacity of each card in the carousel, based on the card's place in the line. You can see a preview of each style on the page before you pick one.

Pick a card to open its editor. It has every slider for that style and a name box. Press Apply. The plugin then builds a controller null, named after the style, with the sliders as Effect Controls. It also builds a camera. Then it adds expressions to position, rotation, scale and opacity on each selected layer, and a rounded-corner mask.

The most useful part is what happens after you apply. The sliders live on the controller, so you can change the look without touching keyframes. Drag a slider and the carousel updates. If an expression fails, the plugin reports it, so you know which layer to check.

The same style data drives the preview in the panel and the expressions in After Effects. That is why the preview matches the result. If you change a style later, the expressions follow.

Classic is the smaller set, with ten layouts: Cylinder, Fan, Ring, Polaroid, Helix, Slide, Radial, Wave Wall, Snap Stack and Along Path. Each one has nine sliders. Use Classic when you want a fast result with fewer settings to think about.

Classic and Carousel Pro are separate engines, so each keeps its own settings.

The Media Carousel builder is in the Tools menu of the carousel page. It builds a carousel from your own footage or images. Pick the files you want, then choose a layout.

Default has three shapes: Spherical, Radial and Rectangular. You set the orientation, the spread, the grid rotation and the falloff. Custom has twelve layouts. Those include Cylinder, Helix, Spiral, Tunnel, Fan, Wave Wall, Stack, Coverflow and Zigzag.

Falloff is worth knowing about. It creates a guide circle layer named Quickbar Pro - Falloff. Cards inside the circle change their offset, scale, rotation and fade. Move the circle to move the effect across your carousel.

G Transition lives in the Text tab. It makes transitions where one piece of content breaks into cells and reveals the next. It has two modes, Default and Custom, and both work from the image you selected in After Effects.

The selection in After Effects always wins. Before any build, the plugin checks what you have selected. A selected footage item, solid or precomp is used first. If you have a shape or text layer selected, a copy of it is used. Only if nothing is selected does it use the item you remember from the project.

Default makes a precomp named after the grid, for example QuickBar Pro Grid 4x4. It has your image, a grid layer that splits it into cells, a flash layer for a colour pop, and a dividers layer. You choose the reveal order from fourteen options, the reveal speed, a speed multiplier and a random seed.

Duration can be set in seconds or frames, from one frame up to 600 seconds. The reveal speed works out from the total time, so the last cell finishes exactly on time.

Custom builds a precomp called QuickBar Pro Transition. Your content sits in it, with a shape layer that works as a matte, so the cells show or hide the content.

You choose from eleven cell shapes, including a custom path. The custom path comes from a shape layer or mask you select. You also choose one of ten motions, one of eight easings, one of fourteen reveal orders, and the origin point, jitter, corner round, direction and seed. A slider named Progress runs from 0 to 100 over the full duration, and each cell has its own timing.

Ink/Goo mode adds a soft, liquid edge. It adds a Gaussian blur and a choker to the matte, so the cells melt into each other. The preview shows the goo effect at low resolution, so it stays fast.

G Transition has eighty-seven presets. They appear as a strip of chips, and you can drag any chip onto the timeline. The presets set the shape, motion, easing and order together, so you get a finished look in one step. Then adjust the settings to match your brand.

Liquid Glass makes glass-look shapes. It creates a matte comp and a glass layer with controls for size, corner round, fill opacity and colour, blur, distortion, bevel, glow, light angle and shadow.

An adjustment layer above it adds the effects that make the glass look like glass: box blur, displacement, hue and saturation, brightness and contrast, glass refraction and a specular glow. Shapes include nine built-in forms and a custom one, made from any selected layers.

RageFX is a library inside the FX tab. It holds UI animations, text animations, transitions, text templates, photo carousels, lower thirds, text plates, editorial pieces, Figma pieces, backgrounds and sound effects.

Items are organised into categories along a ribbon at the top. Hover over an item to preview it, and use the action buttons beside the preview to work with it.

Large projects get hard to follow. Which precomp uses which footage? Where did this layer come from? The Tree view in FX answers those questions.

It has three modes. Comp shows the layers in the active comp, and expands precomps several levels down. Project shows folders, comps and footage, and you can open a comp to see its layers. Dependency map draws the connections as a node graph.

The node graph is the default. Drag nodes to tidy them, pan and zoom, collapse branches with the arrows, and double-click a node to jump to it. Use the Comp or Project switch to choose the scope. The map follows up to sixteen levels of nesting, and it stops at a large node count so it stays responsive.

Comp Saver lives in GBuilder. It saves the active comp, with a preview, into a library folder on your computer. The preview is a GIF, a still image or a set of frames, depending on what you render.

The library shows each saved comp as a card. Cards update live, so a preview that is still rendering appears when it is ready. Import any saved comp into a project later and it arrives as a layer. This makes Comp Saver useful for building a library of your own scenes.

Storyboard is an infinite board in the Magic tab. Add images, video, audio, files, notes, text, shapes, lines, pen strokes and links. YouTube and Instagram links play inside the board.

The Get button pulls the layers you select in your comp onto the board. Footage becomes a media item, and other layers become notes with their name and kind. This is the quickest way to start a shot list from a finished comp.

Double-click a piece of media to open it full screen inside the board. Double-click empty space to write a note. Your board is saved on your computer.

Three smaller tools are worth knowing. Captions in the Text tab edit SRT files, generate captions with AI transcription, and check spelling. The number counter makes an animated number from a start and an end value, with formats, currency, compact K, M and B forms, Indian digit grouping and easing. The easing graph lets you draw an easing curve by hand and reuse it everywhere.

Start with the presets. They show you what each tool can do. Then change one setting at a time, so you learn what each one controls. Keep the controller null and the adjustment layers named clearly, because the plugin names them after the tool, and the names are how you find them later.

If something does not work, check the error message in the panel first. Expression errors are reported with the layer that caused them. Then check the After Effects version, since some presets need 2024 or newer.