Feature Focus: New After Effects Spectrum UI & Windows UI Performance Improvements

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.