Motion designer Mike Gaynor built Caddis over four months in nights and weekends, and pitched it as the layer timeline you already know paired with a node graph inside every single layer.

Work starts in a familiar stack of layers, with keyframes and timing edits on a timeline. Select a layer and its node contents appear in a graph panel beside the timeline and viewport. The idea is to avoid choosing a single paradigm when motion work often lives between both. Inside that per-layer grahp, the beta already includes more than 100 nodes to wire together. Nodes can drive parameters directly, with examples like linking rotation to scale, scale to audio, and audio to color.

Caddis Layers can stay simple, or turn fully procedural

A layer can stay as basic as one line of text, or expand into a fully procedural build with fields, shapes, video, and audio flowing through it. The demo frames it like patching a modular synth, with links between values, movement, and math. The product site leans into the same concept with a promise of visual logic in place of expressions, and a workflow where every parameter becomes something you can wire, modulate, or replace. It also positions the node graph as the home for compositing work like blending, masking, and mattes. Color tokens appear in the demo as a way to recolor a whole project in one click. The demo also shows saving subgraphs as recipes, then reusing or sharing them as a single file.

Responsive comps, plus GPU-native rendering

The demo says designs can be responsive, showing a resize from 16 by 9 to 9 by 16 with the layout adapting on its own. Caddis describes itself as a native desktop app on a modern GPU pipeline. The website calls out GPU-native rendering, aiming for a responsive viewport while iterating, and exports without leaving the tool. Treat that as a marketing claim until your own workstation agrees. Either way, new tools and innovations should be tested before use in production, ideally on real shots, real deadlines, and at least one truly cursed client change request. Beta is coming, so we obviously haven’t tried it yet – sign up as well, we’ll learn together what actually appears when Caddis comes out.

Import and export reality check

Caddis positions itself as an alternative rather than a drop-in replacement for After Effects and does not import After Effects projects. Instead, it works by importing media and rebuilding comps inside the app. On export, the product site lists standard formats including Apple ProRes, MP4, and image sequences including H.264 and ProRes, plus PNG and OpenEXR image sequences, and standard web formats. The demo additionally names WebM and GIF, plus PNG sequences, as native.

Caddis Pricing, beta status, and platform notes

Caddis is free during beta. The product site lists a $99 launch price for early adopters and $129 regular pricing, positioned as a one-time purchase with no subscription. The software should be compatible with macOS 12.0 or later, with a Windows version due shortly after launch. If you plan to roll it into a pipeline, assume the usual early-tool homework: bake out deliverables, double-check colour management expectations, and confirm the layer graph behaviour does not change between beta waves.

https://www.caddis.app/

The post Caddis mixes layers with nodes per layer first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.