Recently François Tarlier released ft-Toolbar 2, which in itself does not have a “ton” of new features, however the features that it does add are absolutely indispensable and make it leaps and bounds more functional than the original.

Create your own custom toolbars with effects, presets, expressions, scripts or any commands you use the most often in After Effects.

If you are unfamiliar, ft-Toolbar will allow you to create your own button panel in After Effects, which is something that is an immense help by not having to continually navigate the mess that are AE plugins and effects (use the search field much?).

ft-Toolbar can simplify your After Effects interface from “panel creep” by having your most used controls in one convenient and dock-able place. ft-Toolbar also now extends the capabilities of buttons, where one button can have multiple functions with a modifier acting as a toggle between them, and the ability to attach default settings to buttons, or add expressions to them for some great possibilities.

ft-Toolbar offers a few button selections including:

  • EFFECT : set the name of the effect you want to use (See usage details below).
  • EXPRESSION : type any expression you want to apply to a selected property>
  • ANIMATION PRESET : select an animation preset file (.ffx) to apply.
  • SCRIPT LAUNCHER : select an script file (.jsx or .jsxbin) to launch, even works with dockable scripts.
  • MENU : call any menu item you want to call. For example : Time-Reverse Keyframes.
  • JAVASCRIPT : type any javascript that AE understands. More advanced, but you can do some crazy macro command with it.  You can find javascript snippets here: http://www.smipple.net/tag/ft-toolbar (feel free to add your own, simply tag it: ft-Toolbar)
  • OS : Any Operating System command you can run into your terminal can be set here. For example calc (on Windows) or open -a Calculator (on Mac) would start the calculator.

You can save 25% on ft-Toolbar 2 as an introductory offer until April 19 2013, and if you purchased ft-Toolbar 1 after March 1st, 2013 you can upgrade to ft-Toolbar 2 for free. If you purchased it before March 1st you can upgrade for $19.99. To learn more, visit the ft-Toolbar 2 for After Effects page over at AEscripts.