Opening Multiple Instances of Adobe After Effects

I am a long-time After Effects user from back in the Cosa days. This was before it was bought out by Adobe. This is a little trick that even when I show it to some power users, their jaw will drop in surprise. Yes, you can open and run multiple instances of After Effects. You can do this on the same computer and at the same time. This trick is so lame and easy to set up. It is crazy that After Effects does not do this out of the box and you have to set this flag.

Set-Up

All you need to do is go in the properties window. You do this by right-clicking on the icon and choosing properties (get info on Mac OSX). After the command to open After Effects you can see that you can enter your own text. In this area, append a -m. This is the flag for multiple. Now you will now be able to open up several After Effects projects all at once.

CoSA After Effects

One of the funny things that I encounter is that most people think that Adobe has always owned After Effects. I started using After Effcts somewhere around 1995. In 1995, Photoshop was at version 2.5 and did not yet have a layering system. You could save selection sets, but once that image was deselcted that was that. I had been doing all these animations fopr CD Rom games in Photoshop. This was laborious. Around that time someone showed me CoSA After Effects which was like “Photoshop with a timeline.” It took me a few months to get up to speed.