00:00:00 FAQ · THE HONEST VERSION
What Brio doesn't do.
Most of this page is about gaps, because that's the part you can't find out from a feature list. Brio is not a drop-in replacement for After Effects, and the fastest way to waste your afternoon is to find that out after you've downloaded it.
00:00:04 MISSING vs AFTER EFFECTS
Things After Effects does that Brio can't.
If your work depends on any of these, Brio won't replace After Effects for you yet. That's a real answer, not a soft one.
Expressions = Modifier Stack
There is no expression language in Brio today. A purpose-built one is designed and on the roadmap, but it isn't built, so anything you'd normally solve with a line of JavaScript has to be solved another way.
What exists instead is a modifier stack — Wiggle, Linear and Driver on any property, plus pick-whipping one value to another, including a font size or an effect parameter. That covers a good share of everyday expression use, and none of the rest.
Tracking, Rotobrush and content-aware fill
No motion tracking, no camera tracking, no Rotobrush, no Content-Aware Fill.
Tracking is coming — it hasn't been scheduled into a milestone yet, but it's going to be there. A Rotobrush and content-aware fill aren't planned, and puppet-style mesh warping is designed but not built.
You can still rotoscope by hand. Brio has bezier masks with feather, stackable alpha and luma mattes, and a Color Keyer with despill. What's missing is the automated, analysis-driven version of all of it.
AE plugins
They won't run. Third-party AE plugins are built against Adobe's SDK, and Brio can't load them.
Brio has its own plugin system — sandboxed WASM effects and JS panels — but it is a different ecosystem and a far younger one. Assume nothing you bought for After Effects comes with you.
Many effects, and many more coming
Brio ships its own effects across blur, colour, distortion, stylize, transitions, keying and generators, plus eight layer styles with blend modes. More are on the way — a whole run of distortion work is planned and written up.
It is still a much shorter list than After Effects' own, before you even count Adobe's plugin market. If you work from a particular effect every day, check it exists before you buy.
00:00:08 WHAT SURVIVES THE IMPORT
Bringing a comp over from After Effects.
A free script writes your comps out and Brio reads them. It is a genuine translation between two different applications, so some of it lands exactly and some of it doesn't land at all.
COMES ACROSS
- Layers and keyframes with their easing, holds and spatial tangents
- Parenting, precomps and nesting
- Shape layers — paths, fills, strokes, repeaters, trim
- Text, including per-character animators and their selectors
- Masks, with their modes and feather
- Cameras and lights, and 3D layer transforms
- Layer styles, blend modes, markers, guides
- Time remapping and layer stretch
- Footage references, by absolute path
DOESN'T, OR ONLY PARTLY
- Most effects. Nine map across — Gaussian Blur, Box Blur, Hue/Saturation, Levels, Exposure, Glow, Turbulent Displace, Corner Pin and Fractal Noise. Everything else is named in the report and left behind.
- Gradient colours. Every gradient arrives as a white-to-black placeholder. This one is Adobe's doing: After Effects doesn't expose gradient stops to scripts at all, so nothing can read them.
- Expressions are sampled to keyframes, not translated. They play back; they stop being live.
- Text on a path imports straight. Box text is re-wrapped to the box width, because Brio doesn't wrap.
- Layer style keyframes. Styles come across, but static — Brio's don't animate. Satin has no equivalent at all.
- Mask expansion has no Brio form. A mask with different X and Y feather gets the average of the two.
- Paths that change vertex count between keys keep only their first key, and shape keyframes inside a rotated, scaled or skewed group are dropped.
- Ambient lights are skipped — Brio's environment lighting does that job differently.
- Audio level curves come across, but After Effects fades in decibels and Brio in gain, so the ramp between two keys sounds different.
It tells you, every time. Each of those becomes a line in a report after the import, naming the comp and the layer it happened to. Nothing is dropped quietly — you get a list of what to go and rebuild.
00:00:12 WHAT EACH EXPORT CARRIES
Going out of Brio.
Video carries everything. The two web formats carry less than people expect, and the difference is worth knowing before you build the job around one.
Video and image sequences
H.264 and H.265, ProRes 422 through 4444 with alpha, GIF, and PNG or linear EXR sequences, with motion blur and audio.
This is the full-fidelity path. Everything you can see in the viewport renders, because it's the same engine drawing both.
Lottie — shape layers only
Lottie export carries shape, null and group layers with their transform and opacity keyframes, easing, parenting and blend modes.
It does not carry text, footage, precomps, 3D, cameras, lights or adjustment layers. A comp built from shape layers exports beautifully; a comp built from anything else largely won't arrive.
Bounce, Elastic and Spring easings have no cubic form in Lottie, so those segments bake to per-frame keys — as does any channel driven by a modifier, a driver, or speed and reverse remapping.
SVG — not the vector you're thinking of
Brio's Animated SVG wraps rendered frames in an SVG and plays them with CSS animation. It is a raster file in a vector container.
That makes it play anywhere an <svg> renders, including
email clients, with no player library. It also means the file grows with
frame count and resolution, and it will not scale cleanly the way real
vector art does.
If you need true vector output, Lottie is the one — with the shape-layer limit above.
Does anything phone home?
Licence checks talk to the store. Crash reports go out when the app falls over, and the updater asks whether there's a newer release.
Figma import and the AI assistant panel reach out only when you use them, and the assistant runs on an API key you supply. Your projects, footage and renders never leave your machine.
00:00:16 PLATFORMS & LICENCE
The practical answers.
Which Macs?
Apple Silicon only — M1 or later. There is no Intel build and there isn't going to be one.
Which Linux?
Ubuntu 22.04 or Debian 12 and newer, as an AppImage or a .deb, in an Xorg session rather than Wayland.
Linux builds don't update themselves yet — Mac and Windows do. On Linux you check the changelog and grab the new build.
What happens when the trial ends?
The trial is 14 days with nothing held back. After it ends the app still opens, edits and saves — only renders carry a watermark until you enter a key. It never locks you out of your own project.
What does a licence cost, and what does it buy?
$99 during the pre-launch sale, and $299 once Brio launches. Buy during the sale and you keep that licence at that price — nothing is charged again at launch.
Either way it's every 1.x release, for as long as there are 1.x releases, on two computers, on any of the three platforms. Nothing renews. A future 2.0 would be a separate purchase and you'd keep the version you own either way.
Who answers the support email?
I do. Brio is one person, so the reply comes from whoever wrote the code that annoyed you. See Support.
Is this list going to change?
Yes, and this page changes with it. If something here is out of date, that's a bug — tell me and I'll fix the page.
00:00:20 OUT POINT
Still worth a look?
14 days, everything unlocked, nothing locked when it ends. Try it against your own work — that's the only test that settles it.