Fixing After Effects' Jogging

If you’ve ever tried to use a Contour Shuttle Pro v2 (or anything similar like Tourbox, Loupedeck, Logitech Creative Console, etc.) with After Effects, you already know the pain.

The jog wheel? A disaster.
The dial? Barely useful.

The playhead refuses to update in real time, scrubbing forward/back is slower than molasses, and the jog wheel insists on fully rendering every frame before moving on. AE is not a video editor, but c’mon Adobe. A piece of software like this shouldn’t feel like you're driving through mud.

 

I hacked together an extension—what I thought was just going to be a quick “meh, this’ll do” project—that turned out way better than expected.  I ended up baking in some pretty slick stuff under the hood:

  • Adaptive resolution on the fly: Jogging can temporarily switch AE into lower res or even wireframe, so it actually feels smooth instead of chunky.

  • Performance throttling + coalescence: Fancy words for “it reacts instantly and doesn’t get stuck if you stop.”

  • Customizable cmd cycles: Tune interval + frequency until it feels just right for your project.

  • Settings that stick: Once you dial it in, it remembers. Debugging/logging included if you want to go nerd mode.

  • Ramp mode: Push the shuttle forward/back and it accelerates through your comp by 50% every second. You can zip through long timelines with speed but still stop on a dime.

And yeah, it’s not locked to just the Shuttle. Technically, any hardware that can throw HTTP requests can hook into this. But if you’ve got a Shuttle Pro v2, I already mapped it and wrote up instructions.

Try It Out

If you’ve got a Shuttle Pro v2 (or you’re just curious), grab it here:
👉 ShuttleBridge on GitHub

Full install guide’s on the repo, including CEP debug mode, mapping examples, and troubleshooting. Works on Windows and macOS.

Bottom line: if you’ve been side-eyeing your jog wheel wondering why you ever bought it, ShuttleBridge finally makes it earn its keep.