After Effects CC is packed with some amazing features but the one we are most buzzed about is the inclusion of the CINEMA 4D application in After Effects. We love all 3D applications but Cinema 4D has been slightly out of our grasp due to the price. It’s therefore amazing that they are actually including CINEMA 4D Lite, which is comparable to CINEMA 4D Prime.
We currently have the boxed version of After Effects and it has now been published that all the great new features won’t be available as a boxed version. You can only gain access to all the amazing new features by signing up to Creative Cloud. We have therefore decided to take the plunge and get signed up to Adobe Creative Cloud. This way we get access to the entire collection.
Of course it’s not all just about the inclusion of Cinema 4D Lite there are also some amazing new features of which we cannot wait to try. These include:
Refine Edge tool, Roto Brush & Refine Edge effect, and Refine Soft Matte effect which are great new features that enable you to improve an existing matte, such as creating partial transparency for the delicate edges of hair. You are not limited to just using the Roto Brush tool to define the initial transparency for the layer either, using the color keying or conventional rotoscoping by drawing masks is just as effective.
Warp Stabilizer VFX has undergone many improvements and can now be used in 3 ways, which are compositing a layer into a shaky scene, stabilizing and temporarily stabilizing to do visual effects work. The refinements also mean that the Warp Stabilizer will not try to correct with scale adjustments which could be a problem before when creating aerial fly-throughs.
3D Camera Tracker effect has also seen improvements and now enables you to establish a ground plane and origin the (0,0,0) point of the coordinate system.
Missing footage, fonts and effects There are three new commands in the dependencies menu for finding missing items shows Find Missing Effects, Find Missing Fonts, and Find Missing Footage. Or you can search for the missing items by typing in any of those into the search field in the Project panel.
Snapping of layer features, including anchor points and masks. This enables you to snap layer features such as the anchor points, a layer corner, the layer handle at the midpoint of a layer edge, the center of the layer and any point on a mask path, the center of any 3D face, or the center of the 3D volume to each another whilst dragging in the Composition panel.
Bicubic resampling in After Effects has algorithms which preserve under-range and over-range values more regularly and are therefore more effective (with fewer quantization errors) at extreme scales and should work more effectively than the equivalent option in Photoshop.
Pixel Motion Blur effect uses the same motion estimation as the Timewarp effect and the controls are also similar to those in the Timewarp effect. The Pixel Motion Blur effect examines video footage and imitates motion blur based on motion vectors.