Adobe ships After Effects CC (October 2017)
Originally posted on 18 September 2017. Scroll down for news of the official release.
Adobe has announced the new features due in its next update to After Effects, including integrated toolsets for editing 360-degree VR footage and creating data-driven animation, plus improved GPU support.
The release – which will be either After Effects CC 2018 or CC 2017.3 if Adobe sticks to its current naming convention – is on show at IBC 2017, alongside updates to Premiere Pro and Character Animator.
Updated: Depending on which part of the Adobe website you look at, the release seems to be officially titled ‘October 2017 release of After Effects CC‘ or, confusingly, just ‘After Effects CC‘, without a version number.
New integrated toolset for editing 360-degree VR footage
For VFX artists, the key feature in the update will probably be the new toolset for editing 360-degree VR footage based on Mettle’s SkyBox Suite of plugins, which Adobe bought earlier this year.
Now “deeply integrated” into After Effects, the toolset enables users to undistort and edit stitched 360-degree videos, and apply effects, titles and motion graphics.
In the former camp, the new VR Comp Editor converts stitched equirectangular footage to a flat image within After Effects, enabling users to edit from the same perspective as the video will be played back.
In the latter, the VR Extract Cubemap option converts the footage to a cubemap, designed to simplify the process of motion tracking and object removal.
There is also a new Create VR Environment option – you can see it at 01:00 in the video above – which looks to be geared towards designing stylised, non-photo-based 360-degree environments for motion graphics.
In addition, the new VR Converter converts footage between a range of common 360-degree formats, including equirectangular, the native cube map formats of Facebook and Gear VR, fisheye and spherical.
Native After Effects effects supported in VR include Gaussian blur, colour gradients, chromatic aberration, de-noise, digital glitch, glow, fractal noise, and sharpen.
Data-driven animation tools for creating graphs and infographics
There are also new tools for data-driven animation, intended for creating animated graphs and infographics.
The toolset enables users to import JSON files generated by data visualisation tools as assets and reference their values in expressions. When the data is updated, any graphics generated from it update automatically.
Although the functionality seems most likely to appeal to motion graphics artists, suggested use cases also include visualising motion capture and sensor data for visual effects work.
There is also a new Create Nulls from Paths panel for linking points on a path together without coding: in the video above, you can see it in use to create an animated line graph.
GPU support for motion blur, layer transforms, and third-party plugins
The process of rolling out GPU support throughout After Effects continues in the update, with support added for Directional Blur, the Bicubic sampling Transform effect, plus Layer transforms and motion blur.
Any third-party plugins that use Adobe’s Mercury SDK are now automatically GPU-accelerated as well.
Other new features: updates to Cinema 4D Lite, font menu and Team Projects
Cinema 4D Lite, the free cut-down version of Cinema 4D bundled with After Effects, has also been updated, adding support for the software’s Take System, used for generating automatic variants of scenes.
The Lite edition also now supports the Parallax Shader, Vertex Color, and the new BodyPaint OpenGL painting engine introduced in Cinema 4D R19, along with the ability to import FBX 2017 and Alembic 1.6 files.
Other changes include a new visual map for keyboard shortcuts; ligature support and live font previews in the font menu; and an Auto Save option for the Team Projects system rolled out in After Effects CC 2017.
Updated 19 October 2017: The October 2017 release of After Effects CC is officially shipping.
The update was released at Adobe MAX 2017 alongside new versions of Adobe’s other Creative Cloud software, including Premiere Pro CC and Photoshop CC.
Adobe also released several work-in-progress tools as full applications: Character Animator, the beta of which came with After Effects, becomes Character Animator CC, while Project Felix becomes Dimension CC.
Other announcements include a new cloud-based edition of Lightroom CC. Find a full summary here.
Pricing and availability
After Effects CC (October 2017) is available on a rental-only basis. Annual subscriptions for After Effects alone cost $19.99/month, while subscriptions to all of Adobe’s creative tools start at $49.99/month.
Read a full list of new features in After Effects CC (October 2017) on the online changelog
Read more about the new features in the October 2017 update on Adobe’s blog