The latest version of Adobe Creative Cloud is hugely focused on simplifying online collaboration. But with After Effects, things are different. Here the focus is on improving your workflow. The announced new features within Adobe After Effects will make you work more efficiently with the program. We have already discussed them extensively during our Adobe CC Event, but are happy to list them again.
Selectable Track Mattes
No more searching for “trck matte” in your workspace. Nowadays you can find track matte under, yep, track matte. Finally the letter a has been added! But fortunately, that’s not the only thing Adobe has adjusted within this feature.
It used to be very cumbersome to work effectively with track mattes. First you had to place the track matte above the layer you wanted to mask, make a duplicate of your mask layer, then you had to indicate on the bottom layer that the top one is a track matte… This fuss is history. The track matte can be anywhere in your workspace. And different elements, whether they are above or below the track matte, can refer to it.
Composition Presets
Until the previous release, the default preset was a 16:9 format. But that has now changed. Today, it is no longer obvious that all platforms use a 16:9 format. For example, Instagram, which works using a square format. In After Effects, a whole bunch of social media presets have been added in the preset settings. This way, adjust your video to the right format in a second.
New Animation Presets
Adobe’s community has not been idle. Thanks to them, no less than 50 (!) new animation presets have been added. It did not work in the previous version, but now you can browse presets to see all animations in Adobe Bridge. Do you like this preset? Then you can find it in your preset window. The presets are not there? Go to the three dashes inside this window and make sure “show animation presets” is checked.
Working with presets is the ideal way to immediately animate things in your video. Unfortunately, it’s hard to always find your liking among the Adobe animations offered. Therefore, Mister Horse is definitely a must to check out. A website that offers you various animation plug-ins for After Effects.
Frame.io integration
Frame.io recently became part of your Creative Cloud subscription. How does this lesser-known platform work?
It’s actually very easy. You upload the active sequence in After Effects and choose share for review. You get the option to email the person, with whom you are sharing the project, directly with an online link and an additional message.
The big advantage of Frame.io? It works through a camera-to-cloud system. This allows this person to provide feedback from anywhere in the world, home, office, country or even continent. This feedback is given in the form of text or an indication on the screen. The project in Frame.io is linked and allows you to view the feedback in After Effects. When you point to a comment, you go straight to the right moment in your timeline. A tip? Make it easy on yourself by grouping, ticking off and replying to comments.
Unfortunately, we do have to inform you that there is a limit on the number of videos you upload on Frame.io. Would you like to increase this or have the ability to work in different teams? Then you should definitely consider the paid version of this platform.
A few more things to improve your workflow
- 264 Encoding: finally you can render H.264 files from the render queu. This is a much more flexible way of working.
- Faster timeline navigation: a big workflow improvement is that you can navigate your timeline faster. Press the letter K to go to the previous keyframe and the letter J takes you to the next one. The disadvantage of using only these two keys is that it stops at every keyframe in your project. Even the keyframes in layers you are not currently working in. To get around this disadvantage, press the shift key.
- Colored keyframe labels: assigning colors to your keyframes is a huge advance for your workflow. The new feature brings several benefits:
- Differentiate different keyframes visually.
- Selecting keyframes in the same color is much easier.
- Make changes to the same color with just one click.
- Components are easier to organize, identify and retrieve.
- Scene Edit Detection: recognize automatic scene changes based on Adobe Sensei. This eliminates the need to manually go through all your footage. Add markers to visually retrieve transitions.
- Import 3D model: Do you like to experiment with animations? Then you could try importing 3D models into After Effects and take on the challenge.
Joska Fleerackers
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