Current status: open beta

Live Unreal Engine renders
inside After Effects

ShotLink turns Unreal Engine into a live render source —
layers, passes, cameras, all in your comp. No waiting, no exports, no round trips.

Get the beta What it does

Free during the beta · Windows · AE + Unreal Engine

No Unreal? Try the packaged Earth scene

Two apps. One window. Live.

Adobe After Effects — ShotLink.aep ▸ Comp 1

SHOTLINK

LIVE FROM UNREAL

LIVE · UE 5

T Title / Motion GFX

◆ AE Camera 1

ShotLink · Beauty

ShotLink · Depth

Unreal Engine 5 — ShotLink_Scene

Perspective · Lit 120 fps

Your comp lives in After Effects

Your 3D scene runs in Unreal Engine

ShotLink brings both together in After Effects

The problem

Kill the render–import–repeat loop

Traditional Unreal-to-AE workflows force you to render, import, check the comp, change something, and render again. ShotLink turns that into a live feedback loop.

Without ShotLink Slow

Every change means another round trip through disk.

Render in Unreal→ Import to AE→ Check comp→ Change scene ↺ …and render everything again

With ShotLink Live

Unreal renders straight into your comp while you work.

Unreal renders live↔ Composite in AE ✓ Final render only when you're ready

What it does

Stay in AE. Render in UE.

ShotLink is an After Effects plugin. Pick a camera in your running Unreal scene, and its render appears as a layer in your comp.

Not just a flat frame: click a point and a 3D null lands on that surface. Beauty, depth, normals, object mattes — any pass you can build in Unreal arrives as its own layer, with real alpha.

The After Effects timeline drives everything. Animate the AE camera and the Unreal camera follows; pick a Level Sequence and the scene animates with your comp. Found a better angle flying around in Unreal? Pull that camera position back into AE as a keyframe.

Turn on Realtime and Unreal keeps sending frames — change a light, a material, the scene itself, and you see it in your comp as you work.

Tap for fullscreen

Real ShotLink session — the AE camera and the Unreal camera are the same camera.

Want more detail?

Watch the walkthrough

Requirements

What you need

OS Windows After Effects 2025.2 or newer Unreal Engine 5.6 or newer

Roadmap

Where it's heading

ShotLink is a practical production tool that keeps evolving. On the radar:

→

Unreal parameters in After Effects — anything exposed on a Sequencer track will become a control on the ShotLink layer. Light intensity, material parameters, actor transforms: the goal is to art-direct the scene from your comp, packaged builds included.

→

Fewer trips into the editor — ready-made presets and setup from the After Effects side, so the things you currently switch applications for will be one control away.

→

macOS support — ShotLink is Windows-only today. Mac is in the works.

→

AE objects into Unreal — sending nulls and solids from your composition into the scene as actors or planes.

→

Colour management — Unreal's own colour handling already works; the plan is to pick profiles and OCIO settings from the After Effects side instead of digging through engine defaults.

Who's building it

Two Olegs, from opposite ends of the pipeline

One spent two decades building game engines. The other spent two decades building tools for After Effects. Together, they built ShotLink — a live bridge between Unreal Engine and After Effects.

Oleg Okhrimenko

Co-founder · Developer

Spent a decade at Crytek working on CRYENGINE and Warface, followed by Technical Director roles at Blackwood Games, Wargaming and Pixagon Games, and later Principal Programmer at Playrix. Develops the native Unreal Engine and After Effects plugins, as well as the core streaming architecture that powers ShotLink.

C++ Unreal Engine Engine architecture

Oleg Yarko

Co-founder · VFX & design

Previously Senior VFX Artist at Crytek, GSC Game World and Blackwood Games, and Lead VFX Artist at Pixagon. An Elite Author on Videohive. Creator of Earth3D, an experimental external renderer for After Effects that later evolved into ShotLink. Drives the After Effects workflow, UX and production pipeline, making sure the tools solve real production problems.

After Effects VFX Motion design

FAQ

Questions, answered

Do I need to know Unreal Engine?

To get going, barely. Drop any Unreal scene in, add a ShotLink camera, and drive it from After Effects. Render passes come as ready presets, and you only go deeper — into MRQ — when you want maximum quality.

Is the live feed final-quality, or just a preview?

Often it's final-quality on its own — many shots ship straight from the realtime feed. For the most demanding shots, you can use it as a live preview: set up the shot in realtime, then make the final render with Unreal's Movie Render Queue (MRQ).

Where do I get Unreal scenes?

Anywhere — Fab, Quixel, marketplaces, or your own. The only requirement is adding a ShotLink camera actor to the scene.

Do I animate the camera in AE or in Unreal?

You animate your After Effects camera and the ShotLink camera in Unreal follows live. You can also pull a camera position back from the Unreal viewport when you find a better angle. When you're ready for a final MRQ render, bake the AE camera back to Unreal.

What render passes can I pull?

Any render pass you can build as an Unreal post-process material, applied per ShotLink camera — common ones like Beauty, Depth and Normal ship as presets. The feed carries alpha, in 8/16/32-bit.

What do I need, and will my machine handle it?

AE and Unreal run on the same Windows machine — ShotLink connects them through a direct shared-memory bridge, with no disk round-trip or third-party Spout/NDI layer. It's a live, interactive feed, and the framerate scales with resolution — so it's a dial you control: while you're placing the camera, work at a lower comp resolution for a smooth, responsive feed; when you need to judge the look, push the resolution back up. No workstation required — our test machine is just an RTX 4060 laptop (i7, 32 GB RAM).

How is it installed?

Two plugins — one for Unreal, one for After Effects. Windows only; macOS isn't supported yet.

Does it work with Sequencer and packaged builds?

Yes. Link a ShotLink camera to a sequence and ShotLink builds a frame-matched After Effects layer of the same length, so swapping in a final render later is painless. It also works with a packaged Unreal build — you still get the live scene in After Effects, just without the Sequencer and Movie Render Queue features (those live only in the Unreal editor).