After Effects 2022 to 2026, on Windows and macOS.

Windows x64, or macOS on Apple Silicon or Intel — the Mac build is universal. The native plugin is Apple-notarized, so macOS raises no security prompts on first launch.

Gulp's colour reporting and guidance work on every supported version. The ACES side relies on OCIO colour management, which After Effects gained in 23.2 — so on After Effects 2022, and 23.0 / 23.1, there is no OCIO to configure. On those versions the free OpenColorIO plug-in from fnord adds it, installed and set up by hand: macOS (.dmg) · Windows (.zip) — or the current version from fnord.com. If you are on 23.2 or later you do not want it: fnord retired that plug-in precisely because After Effects made it unnecessary, and it is kept only for opening old projects.

No. Both ship with After Effects, so you already have them. Gulp uses its own native plugin to set their channel selection on each layer for you — the part that is otherwise done by hand, pass by pass.

Redshift, Octane, Arnold, V-Ray and Cinema 4D's own renderers — anything that writes multipass or multichannel EXRs. Gulp reads the file, not the renderer, so it is not tied to a particular one.

No. Shot building takes any image sequence — a TIFF or DPX beauty with PNG passes beside it builds the same comp as an EXR one. What is EXR-only is multipass: passes packed inside a single file. Gulp reads those from the EXR header; a layered PSD or a multichannel TIFF comes in as a single item, read and chipped but not taken apart. One honest edge: a lone PNG or JPEG sequence with no passes beside it is not assumed to be a render, so it keeps its filename rather than being called "Beauty".

It builds a named comp with every pass on its own labelled layer, filed into tidy project folders. Lighting passes get additive blend modes, data passes arrive parked rather than polluting the picture, and the EXtractoR / IDentifier channel selection is set on each layer by Gulp's native plugin. If the shot has a beauty pass, the comp opens with the other passes switched off so you start from the picture.

Yes — that is the point of the browser. Gulp parses each EXR's header at browse time and shows the passes it contains, the channel layout, bit depth (16-bit half or 32-bit float) and the frame rate where the file carries one. The build dialog states the detected colourspace and bit depth before anything is imported.

Yes — stills, image sequences and movies all get a thumbnail of the actual frame, rendered in the background and cached, and you can hover a row and run the pointer across it to scrub through the shot — the same hover-scrub Premiere Pro has always had, without importing anything. A slider sets the thumbnail size and one button switches back to plain icons; both settings are remembered. Depth and matte passes are rendered so they read, rather than arriving as black tiles. Illustrator files are the one gap: they are recognised and chipped, but an .ai is a PDF container and nothing bundled with Gulp rasterises one, so those rows show no preview.

Yes. A Cryptomatte AOV is imported intact — never extracted, never split into luma mattes — and Gulp applies After Effects' own Cryptomatte effect to the layer as it builds, so you can click an object in the viewer and get its matte. In the browser, each file carries a chip read from its cryptomatte metadata, naming every type it holds — object, material and asset/ID alike, read from the file's own manifest rather than a fixed list. Cryptomatte sequences thumbnail and hover-scrub like any other footage, so you can run the pointer across the row and watch the ID colours change with the shot. If a matte cannot decode — packed inside a multipass EXR, where the channels exist but the manifest does not, or with its sidecar manifest left behind — Gulp flags it in amber before you import, rather than letting After Effects tell you "No Cryptomatte layers found" afterwards.

Depth arrives as one layer with the Z channel routed to RGB and the black/white points set from a near/far range, prefilled from the render's camera metadata where the renderer writes it (Redshift does). PuzzleMattes split into one luma-matte layer per ID, ready to use as track mattes — and a matte baked as a single ID at render time stays as one layer rather than three duplicates.

Gulp shows a completeness bar — frames present against the expected range — and updates it as frames land. Tick "Watch this shot for renders" and it extends the comp and every pass layer as new frames arrive, with no re-import and no rebuild. If earlier frames turn up, it asks whether to slide the shot to the new start rather than guessing.

Gaps are visible in the browser before you commit, and missing frames are named rather than just counted — hover the badge to see exactly which. Gulp can also silence After Effects' own missing-frame dialogs so a gappy sequence does not interrupt you.

Yes. Dropbox, OneDrive and iCloud are supported. Online-only files are clearly badged, reading a header never triggers a download, and you can pull down only what you need from the browser — right-click, or click the badge. Every download prompt states the cost in GB before it acts.

Yes. Right-click any multipass EXR and Gulp writes each pass out as its own EXR sequence with a progress bar, then opens the output folder — useful for handing a single pass to a colourist or another application. You choose the output compression: DWAB, DWAA, ZIP or PIZ. It is done by the bundled oiiotool, so every EXR compression is handled.

Yes. Quick import has its own dialog covering frame rate, where the footage lands in the Project panel and how layers are named, and it can drop straight into the active comp. Loose movies and stills can build a comp too, sized and timed from the footage.

Yes. Gulp scans the project for missing footage, matches it against a folder you point at — to a search depth you set — and relinks in bulk: sequences, stills and movies, including items whose type After Effects misdetected. Ambiguous matches get a per-item choice rather than a silent guess.

It reads your project's live colour state — engine, OCIO config, working space, bit depth — and walks you through an ACES setup, recommending 32bpc and an ACEScg working space for scene-linear EXRs. After Effects does not let a script change everything here, so Gulp sets what is settable and tells you plainly what to click for the rest, rather than pretending otherwise.

One click sends the active comp to an open Premiere Pro project as a Dynamic Link comp, with the option to drop it at the playhead. If the After Effects project has not been saved yet, Gulp prompts you to save and carries on.

Five themes ship in Preferences, picked from a strip of tiles — each tile is a live render of the panel in that palette, so you choose by looking instead of applying a theme to find out what it looks like. The default matches After Effects' own darkest interface with the standard Adobe accent; the others range from muted dark schemes to a light option.

A CEP panel plus a native After Effects plugin (AEGP) that does the comp building and channel routing, and a bundled copy of OpenImageIO's oiiotool for pixel work.

Install and license through the aescripts + aeplugins manager, which also places the native plugin for you. A trial is available from the manager's Account menu — choose "Add Trial". A ZXP/UXP Installer route is available too. After installing, restart After Effects and open the panel from Window ▸ Extensions ▸ Gulp.