Today, we’re proud to announce a new look for After Effects in Beta!
As of Beta Version 24.4 build 20 — available today — After Effects is themed and styled using Adobe’s Spectrum design with a new modern look across the entire app.
After Effects Beta now ships with three different themes: Darkest, Dark and Light. There’s also a new toggle for switching between a high-contrast mode for easier visibility and accessibility or a low-contrast mode for focusing on your content.
Additionally, we’re also shipping GPU-accelerated UI performance improvements on Windows computers. This improvement may be most noticeable in timeline interaction, comp overlay drawing, and on multiple monitors.
This is a beta release with additional fixes and changes rolling out in the coming weeks. Please let us know if you encounter any issues — particularly with specific GPUs — or have suggestions. Feedback from our beta community is appreciated and essential for building better and stronger versions of After Effects. We’re so excited for you to try the After Effects Beta and can’t wait to hear what you think!
Known issues:
Users with some older Intel Integrated GPUs may experience some instability with our updated overlay — work is in progress on this, and we will update when this is fixed. If you experience any instability, please let us know.
We have done testing with ScriptUI but can't anticipate every third party script out there, please let us know if there are scripts that are not working. In some cases, the script developer may need to update their script. We have tracked down an issue with some third-party scripts that use png files on Windows that causes an "Unexpected Data Type" error. We are currently investigating. If you delete the ModifiedWorkspaces and OriginalUserWorkspaces folders in the preferences to reset the workspaces, you should be able to open After Effects (Beta) without encountering the error. If you then open third-party panels one at a time, you will be able to determine which one(s) are causing the error, which should allow you to continue using the Beta.
Update: this issue has been fixed in build 28.
We have also fixed an issue with single character buttons not rendering the character.
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Replies
Hello,
For visibility, these are the ScriptUI bugs we are now tracking from Paul's post and further communciations. Please let us know if there are any items with ScriptUI and the new skin that might not be captured in the following list:
Thank you for helping us identify these issues. We will be actively looking into solutions as well as reaching out if added support APIs are needed for the new skin, especially the addition of lightmode as we likely don't have a way today for developers to be theme aware.
All the best,
Jessica McMillan
I also have a visual problem with my custom ScriptUI Panels within the new UI
Looks horrible and very unprofessional 😞
Hello @Felix Dames
One option I plan to look into is if we switch to a different style button that matches the old styling a bit closer.
An example of that look is the following:
I think the first row matches somewhat to the old style you had. Will let you know when we have an update in the beta.
All the best,
Jessica McMillan
AE Engineering
@Brian C Carter and @Jessica McMillan
First of all, as stated in my other comment here, congrats on the new UI. This feels much better than before, especially in terms of the speed on Windows!
However, in addition to the already mentioned issues in this thread, I have two to three problems myself with the new UI:
1. Shy'd layers aren't easily identifiable anymore
In the old UI, shy'd layers were indicated by a very visible line. However, in the new UI, the color of this line a much more like the general UI color whereas the lines between regular layers are siginificantly stronger (meaning darker). This makes it much harder to make out whether you have shy'd layers in between your regular layers. I'd like to ask you to darken the line where shy'd layers are (or to reduce the darkness between regular layers). To show you what I mean I created this image:
2. New font not as readable as the old one
I personally liked the older font more. The new font is bolder and therefore the letters are harder to read - at least that's how it is for me. I assume the new font is some type of new general UI you're going for, so it's probably unrealistic to ask of you to change this back to what it used to be but I figured I might try. 😉 Or maybe you could implement some way to select either of the fonts?
3. Super niche issue with certain Unicode blocks
Additionally, and this is admittedly a super niche aspect that's probably just affecting me and a very small portion of users but the old font allowed for a Unicode block like Halfwidth and fullwidth forms to render in a very distinct way whereas the new font renders it pretty much like any other regular letter. I made much use of the old font's behavior in my scripts in order to indicate layer statuses in clearly visible way. Unfortunately, this isn't possible with the new font anymore. Now, I know it's a super niche issue, so I'm not asking for you to change this but I at least wanted to bring it up. Maybe if there's some way to revert back to the old font (as requested in #2 to improve readability), this could also resolve this issue. Here's an image about what I'm talking about:
Thanks for all your work and I hope you consider my suggestions. 🙂
Best wishes, Constantin
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