Quickbar Pro: a guide to every panel in the plugin

Quickbar Pro is a plugin for Adobe After Effects. It puts the tools that motion designers reach for most into one place, so you spend less time hunting through menus and more time making the piece.

It is not one big feature. It is many small tools that save a few seconds each, and a few large ones, like carousels and transitions, that would take an hour by hand. This guide walks through the whole plugin, from the top of the panel to the bottom.

Quickbar Pro costs $2, one time. There is no subscription. A Single licence covers two computers. A Team licence covers one computer per seat.

The banner sits above every tab and never moves. It has twelve one-click buttons. Six are on the left: Null, Adjustment, Text, Bounce, Elastic and Quick Morph. Six are on the right: Precomp, Separate precomp, Un-precompose, Paste Image/SVG, Loopy and Rubberize.

In the middle you see the Quickbar Pro logo and a work timer. Click the logo to open Settings. The timer opens an analytics view with your streak, your daily average and your weekly total. It is a simple way to see how much time you spend in After Effects.

When the panel is narrow, the banner shrinks. The buttons get smaller, the logo hides, and at very narrow widths the centre hides too. The buttons stay usable at every size.

Below the banner is the tab bar. It has ten tabs in this order: Home, Timeline & 3D, Colors, Tools, Text, Graph, FX, GBuilder, All and Magic. You can change the order, and you can hide tabs you never use. The order and the hidden tabs are saved on your computer.

Right-click a tab to open it in its own floating window. Some tabs have a small pop-out button at the end of the bar too. The floating windows are useful when you work on two monitors.

Home is the tab you will use most. It starts with an anchor grid of nine buttons and an align row. Pick an anchor point, then align or fit layers to the frame or to each other in one click.

Next is the quick transform row: Flip H, Flip V, Rotate R, Rotate L, Props and Repeat. These act on the selected layers. Repeat is handy when you need the same move again on several layers.

The bottom line holds a rename box, a search button, a bulk rename button, a stagger button with a direction control, and settings. Bulk rename changes many layer names at once. Stagger offsets layers in time, so they enter one after another. Press Ctrl+K to open global search, which finds any tool, layer or command. The Home tab also has strips for Select, Trim, Glass, Shapes and Labels.

This tab has two sections, one for the timeline and one for 3D. Each section is a grid of buttons for the actions you use on layers: splitting, trimming, duplicating, keyframing, numbering and more.

You can make the grid your own. Turn on edit mode to reorder buttons or hide the ones you never press. Each section also has a size setting, from XL down to S, and a pop-out button. Your layout is saved on your computer.

The Colors tab holds a colour picker, a Best tab with palettes, and a Brand tab for your own colours. You can also set label colours and keep a set of swatches ready. Use the picker to set text and shape colours, and the swatches to keep the whole project in one palette.

Tools has four sub-tabs. Qfx holds kinetic text presets, with a preview of each one. Safe Zone shows the title and social safe areas so you can check your frame. EXPR is an expression kit, with common expressions ready to insert. Text holds quick text helpers.

The panel notes that Qfx kinetic presets run on After Effects 2024 or newer.

The Text tab is the biggest of the text tools. It has four sub-tabs. TxtKit holds text animation presets, grouped into Text Animator, Text, Motion, Physics, Transform, Effects and Glitch, with a live preview of each one.

Captions makes captions from your video. It has an SRT editor, AI transcription through Deepgram, and a spell check. Font Replace swaps fonts across the project in one go. G Transition builds grid and custom transitions. It is covered in the second article on this blog.

Graph is for motion. Value Graph is an easing curve editor, so you draw the speed of a move instead of guessing it. Motion Effects and Presets hold ready-made motion you can apply in one click. Shape has tools for shape-based motion. Carousel holds Carousel Pro and Classic, which are also covered in the second article.

FX holds the effect tools. FX gives you one-click effects and presets. Layout is a layout builder for placing layers. Tree shows the structure of your project: the comp tree, the project tree and the dependency map. Click any item to jump to it.

RageFX is a library of UI animations, text animations, transitions, lower thirds, text plates, editorial pieces, backgrounds and sound effects. Hover over an item to preview it before you use it.

GBuilder is for graphics and project notes. It has a G builder for building graphics, a notes area and a Comp Saver. Comp Saver stores a comp with a preview image, so you can bring it into another project later as a layer. Project notes and tasks sit here too, so the to-do list lives in the file.

All gathers the tools that do not fit a single tab. It has offline folders, an icon studio, a downloader, resources, saved footage and an alphabetical list of every tool. Use it when you know the name of a tool but not the tab it lives on.

Magic sits at the end of the bar. It has SS to Layer, which turns a screenshot into a layer. Storyboard is a whiteboard for planning shots. It can take the media from the layers you select in your comp, so your storyboard starts from your footage. 3D Camera has camera tools for 3D layers. QKit is a kit of extra helpers.

You do not need every tab on day one. Start with the top banner and the Home tab. Those two cover most daily work. Add Graph when you start animating by hand, and Text when you need captions or kinetic type. Turn on the rest as you find you need them.

Quickbar Pro is one panel. Hide the tabs you never open, and reorder the rest so the ones you use stay close to the front.