Tuesday, September 9th, 2014 Posted by Jim Thacker

Adobe unveils After Effects and Premiere Pro CC 2014.1

Originally posted on 9 September. Scroll down for updates.

Adobe has announced its latest updates to its professional video tools, including After Effects and Premiere Pro, rolling out a global overhaul of their user interfaces designed to work better with high-DPI displays.

The company has switched back to version numbering its Creative Cloud releases, so the new versions are either CC 2014.1 or CC 13.1, depending on where you look. The updates were announced in time for IBC 2014.

New UI optimised for Retina displays and Surface Pro tablets
The main feature in After Effects CC 2014.1 is the new interface: designed to scale both content and UI items to the appropriate resolution for HiDPI devices like Apple Retina displays or Microsoft’s Surface Pro.

According to product manager Steve Forde, the new UI is also designed to “reduce the visual clutter that often comes with a 20-plus-year-old product”, and is “just the first step with all our applications”.

Updated Cinema 4D workflow
Cinema 4D Lite, the cut-down version of Cinema 4D bundled with After Effects, has been updated to R16 – although quite what that brings users is still a moot point.

Adobe specifically namechecks the new Reflectance channel, but so far the comparison table on Maxon’s website doesn’t seem to have been updated to show what other features of R16 the new Lite version includes.

However, After Effects’ Collect Files command now works with assets associated with C4D files, so it should collect your textures automatically.

The Cineware plugin, which links the two apps, has also been upgraded, improving workflow when working with layers, and enabling region of interest rendering to work properly. You can see the new features in this video.

Native support for GoPro footage, other minor updates
Other than that, there are a number of smaller changes, listed in full on Adobe’s blog, including a new Copy With Relative Property Links command, and better colour management when working with Dynamic Link.

After Effects CC 2014.1 can also now read and write GoPro’s CineForm Intermediate codec natively.


The original teaser video for Premiere Pro CC 2014. The 2014.1 release builds on the masking and tracking tools it introduced, and adds new search, media browsing and transcoding workflows.

Premiere Pro gets new search, media browsing and transcoding workflows
For our money, the new features in Premiere Pro are bigger: as well as the new UI, Premiere Pro CC 2014.1 introduces advanced search and project browsing workflows, and new transcoding and test rendering options.

Of the former, the new Search Bins enable editors to build new bins automatically based on metadata searches within a project, with results showing as aliases of the original project items, while Timeline Search finds and selects clips within a sequence based on criteria like clip name or marker comments.

Users can also now have Media Browser panels for multiple Premiere Pro or After Effects projects open simultaneously, while the new Source Monitor Timeline View can preview sequences from those projects.

The new Consolidate and Transcode option converts sequences or an entire project into a single codec, while retaining the ability to make edit adjustments later, and leaving original projects untouched.

And Render and Replace enables quick timeline renders of clips and dynamically linked After Effects compositions – again with the ability to return to the original media or comp at any time.

Expanded format support, improved masking and tracking
Like After Effects, Premiere Pro CC 2014.1 gets native support for the GoPro CineForm codec, along with the AJA RAW format from the new CION camera, plus GPU debayering for Phantom Cine and Canon RAW footage.

The masking and tracking functionality introduced in the original 2014 release has also been updated.

New features include a free-draw polygon pen tool, and better on-screen Bezier adjustments, with feathering and expansion now accessible directly from the monitor.

And again, there are also a number of smaller improvements, set out in this blog post.

Updates to all the pro video tools to roll out in a few weeks
The other tools in Adobe’s pro video line-up, including SpeedGrade, Prelude, Media Encoder, Audition and Story Plus, have also been updated, as has the Adobe Anywhere collaborative video editing platform.

You can read summaries of their new features on Adobe’s blog.

Updated 9 September: The 2014.1 releases are now available. Maxon has also issued a press release that summarises the changes in Cineware 2.0.

Read a full list of new features in After Effects CC 2014.1

Read a full list of new features in Premiere Pro CC 2014.1

Read an overview of the new features in Adobe’s other professional video products