Welcome to Keyframe Color Labels in AE!

[Christine Goldby]

We are very happy to bring a new feature to the Beta. As of today’s build (22.5.0 Build 18) you can now color your keyframes with one of AE's label colors. This has been a huge customer request, and we know users that saw the sneak-peek at MAX have been anxious to get their hands on it.

Right-click on any keyframe(s), select ‘Label’, and choose the color you want assigned. You will also notice an option to ‘Select Label Group’, where you can use that color label as the basis for a selection. We have a few more features coming very soon, including scripting hooks and additional selection options. So stay tuned…

The new color labels led us to realize we needed a better keyframe selection UI. We wanted to allow you to see the label colors even while selected, and to make sure the selection didn’t disappear if that label was blue. This release includes the new selection UI that we would like you to experiment with. To show the difference, in the example images below I want to select the yellow keyframes, which sit next to the blue ones:

Give it a spin for a few days and let us know what you think. As mentioned above, we will have a few updates coming quickly so you can dig in even further.

Enjoy!

[Hossam Hassan Sakr]

Nice update!! thanks 

[Christine Goldby]

Hello everyone! We are very happy to announce that Keyframe Color Labels has shipped this week with 22.6. 

Thank you for all of your feedback and help in making this a solid feature!

[the_dudes]

That is great news indeed, and the usability for scripting is a nice cherry on top. I'd like to give the following critzism: The outline is really bold. It's quite unusual, and doesn't match the rest of the UI at all. Is there any chance for you to make it stand out just a little bit less, like with half the strength?

[TimKurkoski]

@the_dudes The thickness of the keyframe selection highlight is meant to be unobtrusive, but we've found that when display scaling is enabled it will increase thickness overall to the proportionality of the keyframe's pixel size. This is an issue I've raised with our design team. More detail in my post here:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/after-effects-discussions/after-effects-22-6-is-now-live/m-p/13185430...

[the_dudes]

Thank you Tim for the answer. It's always nice to directly interact with AE VIP 👍. – As for my remark, I don't have any scaling applied on my PC, running at 1920x1200 natively (see screenshot attached). After all, the rubbery, wetsuit outline seems thick to my eyes, but they're maybe gonna have to realign.

[Hse-Di26116266dgl0]

How can I get the selected Keyframe blue as it always have been (Current Selection) ?

The New Selection is a pain to the eye and It can be a loss of time to assign specific color to keyframe.

If I can't get the standard selection, please stop make features that we are forced to use, I am very displeased.

[TimKurkoski]

Hi @Hse-Di26116266dgl0 ,

There is no option to disable the new keyframe selection highlight.

While designing the new keyframe color labels, we realized that there was an obvious conflict between adding color overlays to keyframes and the existing keyframe selection highlight which was itself a color overlay. Thus, a new model for indicating selected keyframes was a requirement.

We went through many design iterations for the highlight before landing on the outline, and once released into After Effects Beta in mid-2022, we took feedback on their appearance and made refinements before keyframe color labels and the new selection highlight were released in After Effects 22.6.

[Hse-Di26116266dgl0]

I have been paying monthly for Adobe. So please, give us the possibility to disable this feature, the blue outline adds too much informations to watch on a timeline (it's like if you were using a outline on selected clips on Premiere, this isn't a good idea. I don't recall that selection higlight on software works with outline on any software, and there must have been a good reason for that. )

The usual selected blue keyframe we have for years was perfectly fine. This isn't respectful to force us to use news features especially when not everyone can be pleased with it. I find this regressive, so please, allow us the possibility to disable keyframe labelling color. I am staying on an older After Effect version as long as possible until there is a solution.