What’s new in 2.0

Gulp 2.0 is the biggest release since launch. The short version: you can now see your renders before you bring them in, finish the picture inside After Effects, and build from Photoshop and Illustrator as easily as from EXRs.

New to the panel? Open Gulp and press Take the tour — or start it any time from Preferences ▸ Help.

See it before you import it

Thumbnails for stills, sequences and movies, with hover-scrub: move the pointer across a thumbnail to scrub through the shot. Turn them on with the thumbnail toggle; the size slider sets how big they are.
Quick Look. Select a row and press Space for a full-size preview window. Sequences and movies play, ↑ / ↓ walk the list without closing it, and the pass menu lets you look at any pass of a multipass EXR. Photoshop, Illustrator and PDF files open too — pages and artboards step like frames. See Keyboard shortcuts.
Movie rows name their codec and show whether there is sound.
Open in DJV on the right-click menu, when DJV is installed.

Finish the picture in After Effects

Gulp Tonemap — an After Effects effect that turns a scene-linear render into the picture the renderer showed. ACES 1.0 and 2.0 (the exact transforms, not approximations), AgX, AgX Punchy, PBR Neutral, Reinhard and Hable, with exposure, saturation and output encoding — and guidance when a setting will not do what you expect. Build can add it for you, on an adjustment layer at the top of the comp. It comes through to Premiere Pro with a Dynamic Link comp.
Gulp Light Mixer — relight a Redshift shot from its light-group AOVs without re-rendering. Tick Light Mixer in the Build dialog and Gulp wires it up: one row per light, named after it, with intensity, colour and temperature. At 100 % the result is exactly the render.
Send Comp to Premiere bakes your OCIO view, so an ACES comp arrives in Premiere looking the way it does in After Effects.

Build more, from more places

Photoshop documents build as compositions, layer by layer, with vector masks keeping their shape operations. Type can come in as editable text.
Illustrator, taken apart — every artboard becomes its own comp, imported as vector, with its type as editable text.
Build several shots at once from different folders. Browse down into subfolders — the panel now looks two levels deep by default — and cherry-pick sequences from several folders into one comp, or turn on Preferences ▸ Double-click to open folders to select whole folders and build a comp from each.
Build ▸ Pre-comp each pass, Make a contact sheet, and Pre-comp the Redshift shadow stack.
Pass layers are colour-coded — beauty green, light groups yellow, lighting blue, utility orange, mattes pink. Change or turn it off in Preferences ▸ Render Pass Colours.
Multipart EXRs — files with several parts, from Redshift, Houdini and others — read with their real pass names.
Drag footage straight into After Effects (Windows): drag a row onto the timeline, into a comp or into the Project panel.

Keep the project healthy

The Relinker lights up when the project has missing footage, so you notice before the render does.
Relink to a different file name. When the right file has been renamed, Choose file… points the missing item at it directly. When several candidates match, Gulp asks which one.
Delete and Rename on the right-click menu — a file, a whole sequence or several rows at once. Delete goes to the Recycle Bin / Trash, never a permanent delete, and warns when the open project uses the files.

A panel that fits

Five themes, picked from a strip of tiles in Preferences.
Super-mini mode — dock Gulp as a narrow column and it keeps just what you need.
Back and forward with the mouse buttons or Alt + ← / →.
Guided tours of the panel, the Build dialog, the Relinker and Quick Look, and a Help page in Preferences that links back here.

Requirements

Gulp 2.0 needs After Effects 2024 or later. On macOS it runs on macOS 12 and later.