Make a big scene bigger. Create cinematic movie titles, intros, and transitions. Start a fire or make it rain. Animate a logo or character. With After Effects CC, the industry-standard animation and creative compositing app, you can take any idea and make it move. There’s nothing you can’t create with After Effects. Animators, designers, and compositors use After Effects to create motion graphics and visual effects for film, TV, video, and the web. Roll credits. Spin words. Twirl titles. Create animated titles, credits, and lower thirds. Start from scratch or with one of the animation presets available right inside the app. From spin to swipe to slide, there are countless ways to make your text move with After Effects. Explosive effects. Mind-blowing results. Combine videos and images to send a UFO across the sky, blur out a logo, or create an explosion the possibilities are endless. After Effects has hundreds of effects to get just the look you want, from adding fog to changing colors to making it snow. Get animated. Set anything in motion using keyframes, including logos, shapes, and cartoons. Add sound for really amazing results. Plays well with others. After Effects works together seamlessly with other Adobe apps. Edit comps and immediately see how they look in Premiere Pro CC with Adobe Dynamic Link. Easily import work from Photoshop CC, Illustrator CC, and Audition CC. And use Adobe Team Projects to collaborate with editors no matter where they’re located.

The big one for this release is speed and stability. The programmers have focused themselves on performance. Adobe have worked very hard to make this huge software is more responsive and this can be seen in many places. The main one which will be immediately obvious to nearly all users, is preview playback optimisation: not only is After Effects creating the ram preview for your project quicker, but once done, you should be able to play back your project in real time, even while you’re interacting with the user interface.

Of course, we say “should”, because as always when working with complex files, projects and effects, there could be instances where it’s clear Adobe still has some work to do. However, during our interaction with the app for this review, we did find the interface to be more responsive, playback to be more fluid, and the whole interface on the whole to be a lot more stable. We’ve noticed performance boosts when using Shape layers, certain expressions were sped up, And the Content Aware Fill feature also greatly benefited from this.

But what’s Content Aware Fill we hear you ask? That’s one of the big ones that were introduced between 2017 and 2020, and is a great new addition to After Effects. We’re well aware this isn’t actually a new feature introduced with the latest release, but it’s so important, we felt we needed talking about it. Photoshop users undoubtably have been aware of a similar feature for a while: it allows you to remove an object from the screen and the background to be seamlessly extended over this gap to essentially make that object disappear. What you could do with a still image in Photoshop, you can now do to video in After Effects. As always, your results will depend on your clip’s content, and we found simple a background yields much better results.

However, you can also see the huge advantage Adobe has in controlling so many properties: in order to improve the effect, you can create a reference frame. Activating this bring said frame into Photoshop, where you can work on removing the offending object, by using that app’s Content Aware Fill to recreate the background. Once done, After Effects will then use that altered frame as a reference to improve its own calculation and give you a more seamless result for your clip.