How to reverse an animation in After Effects

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Let's say you have a motion you want to reverse or you want it to go back to the starting position so that you can loop the motion.

I'm going to show you two different ways of doing it, one with individual layers and one with the whole composition.

First, to reverse a single motion, just select that layers keyframes and then right click on one of the keyframes, go down to "Keyframe assistant" and click "Time-Reverse-Keyframe". Pretty simple.

The other method is to select all the layers, right click on one of the layers and then click "Pre-compose". Click "OK" and now you will have a composition inside your composition and to access the individual layers, just double click on it to open it in a new tab.

Now right click on this composition, go up to "Time" and click "Time-Reverse Layer" to reverse the whole composition.

I hope you liked this video and if you want to see more quick tutorials just like this one, please subscribe to the channel and check out my playlists about After Effects, Premiere Pro and Final Cut.

Keep learning and have a great day!

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[DavidLindgren]

🎁 Here are some helpful resources for you:

[princeling]

Quick, to the point, and excellently explained. Thank you.

[Ryoogah]

Thx, for this clever little work around, never wouldve thought to just precomp and reverse that way

[sctty]

The Time-Reverse Keyframes works great, especially if you don't want to pre-compose and your animation doesn't involve a lot of layers. Keep in mind that if you use this on multiple properties at the same time (e.g. position and opacity), AE only reverses each set of keyframes individually, not as a unified group. This means each set maintains its original position on the timeline, so you’ll still need to manually align them after reversing to maintain the intended timing. I still prefer this method over pre-composing, depending on the number of layers/properties involved.

[Danny-bnfg]

I really appreciate your work. You certainly know things work no doubt and I also really like the fact that you make short videos 👍 but honestly this enlarged circle section i found quite confusing.

[HybridMiranda]

Thank you! this helped me in a very short amount of time :)

[Flow-]

thank you for making the vid for noobs like us ^_^ i instantly finished the project with this

[minharali]

but bro the sounds are also reversing so what will be the method to reverse only animations not sounds

[sumbodyshero]

Didn't quite work for me. If you are looking to reverse the director of a text animation found in Adobe Bridge, click the arrow under the layer name, go to "text", "animator 1", "advanced", and change "Add" to "Subtract"