New in AE Beta: Color Labels for Effects!
If you’ve been on recent After Effects Beta builds, you might’ve noticed the Effect Control Panel getting a little tidier: things like GPU Acceleration and Camera Aware have moved to the right side of the effect header, and Reset is a proper button instead of plain text. Today we’re excited to tell you why.
As of build 26.5x7, After Effects allows you to assign color labels to individual effect instances on a layer.
When you add an effect (or open a project that already has effects), you’ll see that familiar small grey square next to the effect name.
Click it and you get the same kind of label menu you already know from elsewhere in AE.
Upon applying an effect, each effect’s default label is None, but you can tag effects however it helps your workflow, same idea as layers or keyframes.
In addition to the familiar square swatches, we've also added (optional) background tinting: the effect row can get a subtle background wash that follows the label color you picked. We've found this to be very helpful when you have a lot of effects and a small Effect Controls Panel.
Showing the label swatch and using the label color for that background tint are two separate things, and both are optional. You can turn each on or off from the Effect Controls panel menu. So you can run swatch-only, tint-only, both, or neither (if you want zero label UI at all).
Got 5 keying effects, 3 color correction effects, and 2 finishing effects?
Got a single effect in the middle of a stack you want to easily find or point out to a teammate?
Do you need to identify which version of effects settings your producer signed off on?
FAQ
I didn't read the above but I really don’t like the background color! Turn it off in the Panel menu!
I didn't read the above but I really don't like the swatch? Turn it off in the Panel menu!
I turned off the swatch but the background color is still applied! Either turn off the background color visibility or turn the swatch back on and set the label to none. If you're interested in other ways of changing the Effect Label, please let us know.
Do the Labels that are applied to effects in the Effect Control Panel show up/can be changed in the Timeline? Not right now, but tell us how you'd like that to work and how it would help you?
I went to turn off the wash or the background color and I saw this Show Animation Presets option, what's that all about? That has been there for years! It will display a row at the top of each effect that will search your presets folder for any saved presets that only use that effect and show them here. You can use the dropdown to choose from all your matching presets and the left and right arrows to browse through them. Try saving a bunch of Fractal Noise presets, they'll be right there every time you apply Fractal Noise.
Known Issues
At the moment, using shortcuts for effect color labels does not work, we expect that to be fixed shortly.
Please give this new feature a try and let us know what you think!!
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