After Effects (Beta)

We are pleased to announce that in After Effects Beta 23.2 build 26 we have two new features: Effect Manager, and Startup and Repair preferences panel. Effect Manager Frequently, when After Effects crashes, it’s because something went awry with a rendering effect and wouldn’t it be great if you knew which one? With Effect Manager, when launching After Effects after a crash, we now show a dialog explaining what effect may have crashed during the last session and allows you to keep it enabled and proceed as-is or disable the effect on your After Effects installation — particularly helpful in the event the effect is crashing on project load. But dialogs are fleeting and ephemeral and you need to know the state of your system at a glance. Now, in the application-level Effects menu, our new Effect Manager dialog allows you to see a list of all your installed effects, with all the details you’d expect of a Manager: Effect Name, Category, Version, File Path on disk. But most importantly: each

I'm about to go crazy. please help!I'm trying to sequence my layers, and it's keeping all of them at the same start point, but making the dissolve I've added. I have no idea why it's happening, because I was able to do it right before. I picked the end point of the layers by using alt+].I did manage to Sequence the layers by clicking "new comp from selection" in the project files, but then I couldn't set my desired duration for the layers. 

HI all .... i'm pretty adept at AE overall ... less so in the 3D space .. I'm on the Beta version ..... and have been working with the Draft button .... i'm wondering if anyone has seen any good tutorials (videos or otherwise) on the ground plane  ? I'm trying to natively build a 3D room in AE 3d space, place 3d objects, cast lights and shadows on the walls etc. It seems (?) you should be able to pin a shape onto the ground plane and make a floor out of it ? any advice or guidance would be appreciated .. .sjk

Dear Adobe Developers, I am the founder and developer at KeenTools. Recently, we released GeoTracker, a plugin for After Effects that enables easy geometry tracking. We were excited to learn about the upcoming native support for 3D models in After Effects! We believe that the combination of our plugin and native 3D will bring unlimited creative potential. The After Effects community is already making incredible things entirely within AE, empowered by the synergy of 3D objects and the ability to easily track them in footage. This tutorial is a telling example of that. Through this post, I would like to express my gratitude for this monumental step and ask some questions from a developer's perspective. Additionally, we have received feature requests from our users that we plan to implement. However, since they are mostly related to the general 3D object pipeline, it is important for us to be in sync with you on these matters. We would greatly appreciate it if the SDK (API)

I have been using AE Beta and having no issues until I've tried rendering out some animated 3d objects and seem to have some weird ghost purple boxes that are not on the original file, anyone know a work around for this?

Hi I'm playing around with the 3D functionality in the beta. I have imported a textured obj file. It works fine. In the project manager I can even see it's texture file (psd). That's really cool. However if I open that texture file in Photoshop and edit it, the change doesn't happen in AE. Since you are linking to the texture file it would be cool if I could update that or even switch it out for another. Another related bug. Once I have imported a obj with a texture file. If I delete the obj from AE. Change the texture file. Export the obj with the same name or another. It will still not update the texture file. It is as if it has already been used, it will be stuck with it. The only way to update the texture is to duplicate the texture and give it a new name, re-export the obj and then load it. - Jakob

Text animators are not listed in the Essential Properties Panel. 

Hello, I have encountered an issue where when I try to add a 3D object into my composition, it completely fails to show the object correctly. (Sometimes its just missing, others some "ghost" components show up. By ghost I mean the following:I export my OBJs from Fusion360 , there are multiple components in my Fusion design, but I export a specific body as an OBJ and then other bodies, not the one I exported randomly show up in the view of after effects. After restarts, the issue randomly goes away/comes back.

Hello Beta users!   We've extended the Properties Panel to support text as of After Effects 23.2 build 53 and we'd like you to try it out!       With Text Properties in the Properties Panel, you can quickly and easily edit all the properties from the Character and Paragraph Panels for your selected layer. Update your font, change your fill and stroke, set your paragraph alignment, and even add Text Animators, all without needing to switch between panels!     Known Issues: The hamburger menus in the new Text & Paragraph sections do not yet work as expected when multiple Text Layers are selected. Adding or removing keyframes using the right-click menu in the Properties Panel will only affect keyframes on the first selected layer. Users who have enabled operating system settings that use a comma (,) in place of a decimal (.) will see the tenths place of transform values truncated in the Properties Panel (i.e. position value in the Properties Panel

Greetings After Effects users! We’re accelerating shape layer rendering with multi-threading, and we’d like to hear how it's working for your projects. In our testing, many shape layers now render at least twice as fast.   In your Creative Cloud app, update to After Effects Beta 23.3x9 or later. You don’t need to do anything special to enable the updated rendering.   Give things a try with some of your more shape-heavy compositions, especially ones with more complex shapes and gradients. You can use the Composition Profiler to compare performance with the release version. Projects are compatible across beta and release. If you have compositions where your shape layers aren’t seeing a speedup or have unexpected behavior, please let us know.   Looking forward to your feedback!  

The lastest After Effects Beta build (23.3x19) includes a performance improvement for selecting layers in the timeline window via mouse click. The improvements should be most noticeable when there are many visible layers in the window. When selecting a layer or layers in the timeline with or without a mod key After Effects should now properly invalidate and redraw only the previously selected layers and the newly selected layers. This will likely be most noticeable when selecting a single layer in the timeline when many layers are visible. Please let us know how this update works for you or if you run into any problems with it. 

In the latest After Effects Beta, you can now access source item timecode via scripting through a new frameTime attribute. This will enable you to specify a particular frame, so you don't need to worry about precision limitations due to floating point rounding that you may have encountered accessing time in seconds. You can set frameTime as far back as 3 hours before the 0:00:00:00 time and as far forward as 1 frame less than 24:00:00:00. Compositions can be a maximum 3 hours in length; these limits exist so you can slide layers that far back or forward. A couple usage examples:   Get the current frame time with var curFrame = app.project.item(1).frameTime;   Set the current frame time with app.project.item(1).frameTime = 105; frameTime is an AVItem attribute, so app.project.item(1) can be replaced with any reference that resolves to one of those. Please give it a try and let us know how it’s working for you.

3D animated FBX file import would be great to import for little animated characters, etc. 

I'm using the latest AE Beta and I downloaded a brain 3D model (obj) from the Adobe stock. Each time I import the file, the model is never whole.  I've toggled the 3d Draft on and off, no difference. the same goes for when I change resolutions from half to full.  Would anyone know as to why the model is not whole?My system:  I tried fbl format, I would then get the rainbow cube.  Quite the unpleasant tease this is.... 

Importing multiple .obj leads to duplicates of previously added objects when dragged to timeline. Using beta 23.3.0 build 11. I then imported glb and it rendered the correct newly added object. 

When using multi-view (4 or 2) I am getting the same viewpoint in all four cameras. Exited and reentered multiview and still happening. Hovering over objects shows where they should be rendering to.  Just updated to AE Beta 23.3.0 but was having this issue with prvious version too. 

Hi there.  Since I saw you all tweaking the colorama's color picker for the next update, It would be nice to change that color wheel to the default shape layer's gradient interface as well. I've worked in a lot of projects in the past that we needed to position the colors precisely on the wheel but it was hard to achive it without a percentage slider parameter like we have on the shape layer's gradient interface. That would be awesome and thank you!

Hello! Starting in After Effects Beta v23.3 build 9, you can now snap layers in 3D space while dragging the constrained X, Y, and Z position handles of the 3D gizmo.   This new behavior is in addition to non-constrained snapping, which has worked with 3D layers since snapping was introduced in After Effects many years ago. Non-constrained snapping is when you reposition a layer by clicking on an arbitrary point on that layer and snap it to another layer.   There's actually quite a lot of subtlety to snapping! If you're not familiar with how snapping works in After Effects, here's a great overview video. This was made when snapping was introduced in a much, much older version of After Effects, but the basic principles still apply.https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/how-to/using-layer-snapping-aftereffects.html   What's new and different today is that snapping now works when you click and drag on the X, Y, and Z handles of the 3D gizmo. This includes the XY, XZ, and YZ

Hi All,I just tried to download and open the Beta v 23.2 on my Mac Studio but the app closes directly before launch. I only see the very first AE splash screen (no loading activity). No crash report generated.The associated Beta Media Encoder opens fine.I have the latest non-beta version of AE installed and that's working fine too.Is anyone else having this issue? Not sure what I'm doing wrong...Thanks,Rupert

hi,while working in compwindow, it happens often, that the footage opens in panel layer window. Like I would do an double clic on it.Or often sticks an keyframe on the mouse(pen)curser, or the In or Out point of an Comp, "sticks" on the curser...anyone else expiring this?

Import de 25 objets 3D (.glb) : active camera out (dézoom la composition et crée des bords gris) - même problème au pré-render. System info    Application: After Effects (Beta) v23.2.0.60    OS: macOS v12.6.2, RAM: 128,00 GB GB, CPUs (logical): 36

About 40% of the time when I use Font Manager, it causes AE beta to crash, regardless of the update. It's never caused the regular version of AE to crash. I let Alex White know about this, and he said that based on the attached error repot that I keep getting from AE, the problem is with the beta version of AE and that it's something Adobe needs to fix.Thanks,Paul

When dynamic linking with Premiere, the links just seem to randomly break. It's easy enough to relink, but it shouldn't be doing that an is quite annoying.

When trying to run a custom UI Script, AFX now hangs for a while, or completely. Issue occurs when script window is open and you run a command. AFX 23.2.0 Build 60.

Been running a project with Beta using OCIO colour management - has been fine in the main. However latest build keeps producing an error when loading the project, saying Config file for OCIO is invalid, despite reapplying settings everytime. Running 23.2.0 Build 60.