Wednesday, September 16th, 2020 Posted by Jim Thacker

Adobe ships September 2020 update to After Effects


Adobe has released After Effects 17.1.4, its September 2020 update to the compositing software, extending support for GPU acceleration among the Channel effects.

Version 17.1.4 was rolled out alongside a separate beta release of the software, described as “reimagining” 3D workflows in After Effects, adding new 3D camera navigation tools and transform gizmos.

Ongoing improvements to GPU acceleration and performance
After Effects 17.1.4 itself is a fairly small iterative update, continuing the workflow and performance improvements from May’s After Effects 17.1.

The main change is that Channel effects are now GPU-accelerated, making them “up to 1.65x faster”.

Effects with GPU support include Shift Channels, Set Channels and the Channel Combiner. Adobe’s blog post also mentions the Minimax effect, although that got GPU support in 17.1 itself.

In addition, motion graphics templates using the Roto Brush effect can now be imported into Premiere Pro.

Other changes since our original story on After Effects 17.1 include better performance when previewing multi-part and multi-channel OpenEXR files: now “3x faster”, according to Adobe.

Pricing and availability
After Effects 17.1.4 is available for Windows 10 and macOS 10.13+ on a rental-only basis.

An annual Creative Cloud subscription for After Effects alone costs $31.49/month, while a subscription to all of Adobe’s Creative Cloud tools costs $79.49/month.


Read more about the new features in After Effects 17.1.4 on Adobe’s blog
(In the section titled ‘Improving performance across the applications’)

Read a full list of new features in After Effects in the online documentation