Suspend work in a scope

  1. Open your composition and choose Selected, Comp, or Nested.
  2. Click the large Draft toggle.
  3. Preview the composition in After Effects.

Draft disables enabled effects and enabled, nonempty expressions on eligible layers. It keeps the expressions themselves. Locked layers are skipped by default, and effects matching Draft Keeps remain running. See Settings to change those rules.

The panel tints while Draft is on. Its badge adds the remembered effects and expressions together. Hover Draft for the separate counts.

The count covers everything remembered in the project, including work suspended in another scope.

With Half Resolution in Draft on, full-resolution comps in scope change to Half. Comps already at Half, Quarter, or a custom resolution stay as they are. In Selected, the resolution change still affects the whole active comp. Draft can therefore turn on with a count of zero when only the resolution changed.

Select layers first means Selected has no selected layers. Nothing here to suspend means there are no eligible enabled effects or expressions and no full-resolution comps to halve. Other failure messages are in Troubleshooting.

Suspend more without restoring

While Draft is on, change scope or select more layers, then Alt-click Draft. This suspends additional eligible work and adds it to the same memory. It can also suspend effects or expressions you have enabled since the first pass. A normal click would restore instead.

Restore the remembered work

Click Draft normally while it is on. Switched restores all remembered effects and expressions across the project, regardless of the current scope or active comp. Items that were off before suspension are not added to the memory and stay off.

Restoration can temporarily unlock a remembered layer and relock it, even if Include Locked Layers is now off. A comp that Draft halved returns to Full only if it is still at Half. If you changed its resolution to another value, that value stays.

The memory is stored in the project. Save the project while Draft is on to keep it through closing and reopening. Click Draft after reopening to restore it. The memory is cleared after restoration.

Edit without losing the restore target

Switched finds effects by their name and type, so reordering effects while Draft is on is fine. Restore before renaming or deleting effects or property groups. A renamed or deleted target can’t be found, and Draft off counts it as missing. Removed comps and layers cannot be restored.

The result reports N no longer found for targets it cannot restore, then clears the memory. It does not offer a second restore pass. Undo the restore if you need to recover and correct the project structure first.

The Quality tile’s Draft value is a separate After Effects layer-quality setting. The large Draft toggle does not change layer quality or render settings.