Hi all 
I’ve been building a plugin that lets After Effects pull a live render out of a running Unreal instance - editor or packaged build - and treat it as a layer in the composition.
How it works.
The UE side registers a producer; the AE side requests a frame for whatever frame the comp is on. Frames go over Windows shared memory, so nothing touches the disk and there’s no video encoding in between — full colour, uncompressed. The AE camera drives a ShotLink Camera actor in the scene, so the two cameras are the same camera by definition, no exporting or converting track data.
What comes across. Beauty, Depth and Normal ship as presets, but anything you can build as a post-process material can come through as its own layer. You can also isolate individual actors into separate layers via ShowOnly, so a scene arrives in the comp already split — surface, atmosphere, whatever you set up.
Round trip. Clicking in the AE image raycasts into the scene and creates a 3D null at the hit point, with surface orientation, so graphics can be parented to geometry without tracking. When the shot is finished, the AE camera bakes back into a Level Sequence — position, rotation, sensor size and focus per frame — and finals render through MRQ as usual.
Packaged builds work too, which means a scene can be handed to someone who doesn’t have Unreal installed at all. Sequencer isn’t available there, but rendering and camera control are.
Currently in open beta and free while it lasts. Windows, AE 2025.2+, UE 5.6+. There’s a sample Earth scene to try it with, both as a project and as a packaged build.
Happy to go into detail on any of the plumbing - genuinely interested in what people here would want from it.