After Effects 24.5 is now available for download!

[nishu_kush]

After Effects 24.5 is now live

Great news! After Effects 24.5 is here, packed with exciting new features to bring your scenes to life. With Shadow Catcher and Animated Models support, creating more realistic and dynamic scenes has never been easier and the new presets are just amazing.

Dive in and let your creativity soar!

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Here's what's New

 

Shadow Catcher

Create realistic composites using a 3D shadow catcher layer to capture shadows cast by overlying 3D models.

Embedded 3D Model Animations Support

Access embedded animations in the imported GLB or GLTF models and select one of them to play back in your composition.

Get depth data from an Advanced 3D Scene

Extract depth data and use the map to create more realistic composites by simulating real-world camera settings for 3D renders.

OBJ Import from Libraries

Drag and drop 3D models directly from Creative Cloud Libraries into your project to enhance workflow, collaboration, and efficiency.

New presets for numbers, shapes, and more

Use new animation presets that cover infographics, numbers, transitions, textures, and more to streamline your creative projects.

Camera and Light properties in the Properties panel

Use the Properties panel to quickly access and edit Camera and Light properties and work with layer transforms.

Features in Beta

New After Effects Spectrum User Interface

Experience the new modern look across the entire app, themed and styled using Adobe Spectrum design.

Per-character text and Paragraph styling in Expressions

Use extended text and paragraph styling capabilities in Expressions, including per-character control for efficient text-based animations.

What's Fixed

• Improved UI interaction performance in the composition panel with Faux Bold enabled.
• After Effects no longer crashes when adding an asset from the library to a folder in the Project panel.
• Animation presets are now applied correctly when Advanced 3D render is enabled.
• Fixed memory leaks that caused users to run into application memory exhausted error where the mask path was keyframed.
• Pasting a keyframe from a scale property no longer gives an error.
• The 3D model layer keyboard shortcut to toggle shadows now works correctly.
• Purging ALL_CACHES no longer shows a confirmation dialog when scripts are run from ScriptUI palette, ScriptUI window, or VSCode Extendscript debugger.
• Purging ALL_CACHES now purges cache successfully if app.purge() is called from a ScriptUI dialog.

How to update After Effects to 24.5

Open the Creative Cloud desktop application and click the Updates tab on the top left. Find After Effects in the list and click Update.

I don't see the update in my Creative Cloud desktop application. What should I do?

Click Help > Check for Updates from the Creative Cloud desktop application to refresh it.

If you are experiencing any issues, please create a new thread explaining your problem so we can help.

[֑nubnubbud]

Cool stuff, i don't care.

If I want 3D i'll use a 3D package.

If i wanted new UI, I wouldn't consider it AE's best strength already.

If I wanted more presets, I'd make them- that's barely even a plugin

We don't need a poor 3D rendering toolset in a 2.5D software when good external ones are free. We're paying for a compositing software to use with 3D.

So when are we getting proper multithreading, GPU usage in more than like 7 effects, and when is AE going to render faster than the 2012, or fastest version, 2014? Can we please get something that doesn't struggle on a few keyed shapes, please? Maybe some actual support for its EXR workflow, perhaps?

Or are you just gonna keep running it into the ground till it buckles under its own poorly supported bloat? It's gotten slower for a decade, to the point that new computers are the only way to avoid total uselessness.

[scrozier]

My firstborn child for: 

GPU acceleration of shape layers

GPU acceleration of "classic 3d"

Using the GPU at all. Nothing like having a $1800 GPU sitting idle when it could be making things render in realtime. 

[֑nubnubbud]

Adobe, holding out hands, suspiciously firstborn-shaped protrusion in their neck:

"May i have another?"

[jackthegiantslayer]

👆This right here. Stop stuffing this poor bloated app with 3D features no professional asked for, just fix the freaking mess you have already made.

[HunchoDreams]

[InfiniteWhale]

You raise a good point actually - I think Adobe have genuinely lost sight of what AE is actually for. 

[֑nubnubbud]

At this point the only real option is remaking it from the ground up with modern tech and the things learned over the last 30 years, but Adobe won't do that. Making software takes investment, and work, and expertise, and Adobe never made most of its software in the first place. Even photoshop was someone else's.

I can't imagine they'll make another even if everyone would stop using AE, because they'd just get to stop maintaining AE and save..  what, 12 devs' salaries? 20, max? They went subscription in the first place because it lets them make continuous money, but not need to invest in research or compelling updates. At this point, by adding AI and just accepting the black box "it works and we don't know how" mentality, it seems their goal is to get rid of development and self-investment altogether. AE's effective implosion was written on the wall 12 years ago, and I was telling them 8 years ago. Then the upper brass deleted the user feedback and bug forums after the community outreach got overwhelmed by the negativity the managers perpetuated by crippling development and started insulting and belittling users.

[InfiniteWhale]

Agree 100%.  I mean it's absolutely insane from Adobe though - beyond After Effects what do they offer that isn't easily replaced? I work for a massive media company, and there's only a handful of us still using Premiere Pro regularly, Photoshop is easily replaced with Affinity, Audition has some good tools but it's not most professionals' go to... personally the ONLY reason I have an active CC subscription is because of AE.  I guess at this point there's nothing we can do except wait for another company with some professional pride to come along and make an AE clone. 

[֑nubnubbud]

It's being done already... and the guys making it are making it hybrid layer/node, which is the holy grail. It's layers which are just stacked nodes in the background, but you can open it up in nodes if you need deeper integration than you could get with optical processes. I'm not sure what/where they are now, or if it failed....

But After Effects leaning into motion graphics is definitely shooting itself in the foot. Motion graphics is low hanging fruit, easy in blender, and someone spun up cavalry, a dedicated free after effects killer for mograph, in like 2 years.

Compositing is all they have... and now that After effects can't be trusted as a professional tool (mandatory breaking updates, buggy releases, degrading performance, poor hardware utilization and scaling), the mograph scene has Cavalry and Blender, and the VFX crew has jumped ship to node based Nuke and its free open source clone Natron, and the 3D crowd has more tools than it knows what to do with (Blender, Maya, Unreal, C4D, houdini, embergen, 10 interchangeable plug and play renderers) it's only the stubborn fanboys and youtube tutorial scene that actually use After effects for anything at all these days.

Even I only keep it around to access my old renders, and I'm looking to replace it ASAP. I even migrated one of them to Nuke. AE has nothing for me but some slight fading nostalgia of my first VFX in high school.

[InfiniteWhale]

To be honest I have to disagree about the motion graphics thing - IMO AE is still the best tool for vector graphics and nothing really comes close, especially combined with the compositing tools it has. I do a lot of 2D character animation, kinetic text and all that sort of stuff daily for work and there really isn't anything that does it like AE.  It's just a badly maintained and unreliable app, and for literally every other task I would go with another app at this point, but for the way I animate I'm unfortuanetely stuck with AE.

But yeah I agree with everything else, and it really doesn't feel like a professional tool.  The hybrid node/layer thing sounds great - if I can do 2d vector animation and stop renting Adobe garbage I'd be happy! 

[֑nubnubbud]

Oh yeah don't get me wrong- for mograph, the tooling is great, but the productivity and preview speeds are abysmal for something as complicated as "move and mask a shape". 

But that's what I'm talking about. I'm not one, but you, an actual mograph artist, can't help but say "yeah it's hot garbage but it supports my workflow". My point is that beyond its workflow, AE is mostly obsolete and poorly maintained, and mograph's visual math is simple. By focusing on AE's mograph tools for so long (last 4-6 years), hardware-anathema AE's last bastion is mograph...

You know, the thing which gpu's are expressly designed for, with math so easy that you can tell middle schoolers to do it, and to a software dev with a graphics library, is probably trivial.

What I'm getting at is that AE's last solid featureset is easy pickings, from a software standpoint, and its users are practically asking for some other company to give them a reason to jump ship.

Still, it wouldn't be hard to make a nuke plugin which makes a layer view and connects the layer UI to some pregenerated nodes and settings. Diving into a layer's nodes would just be opening the node panel, and otherwise it would be 90% just a string of merge nodes with branches for precomps.

[orki30939121]

After the last update, After Effects started to freeze and took some time to become responsive at the start. It opens, shows the recent project window, then it blanks and freezes for a while. I updated my Nvidia drivers to the latest version with no difference. at all. This wasn't an issue with the previous versions. I use a decent 2023 laptop with fast Gen4 m.2 SSD's and 64 GB RAM, with a 4080 laptop card btw. 

[֑nubnubbud]

AE doesn't really use GPU, sadly. Mine actually renders slower if I turn it on. You need davinci, blender, or nuke for that. If you're going to include specs, CPU, RAM amount, and drive tech are the only parameters that will significantly change anything.

[Paul5E1C]

I'm so tired of this. Yet another awful update. Crashed 5 times yesterday on simple projects. Unusable today on a marginally more complex one. Stop adding more "features" that nobody cares about, nobody wants full 3D in AE, it can't even render 2D efficiently. Fix the UI and the painfully slow RAM preview, this software is taking huge leaps backwards with every update and I'm sick of it. 

[SteveBlacker]

100000%

[scrozier]

I hope the never ending out of memory errors have stopped. 

[Paul5E1C]

Nope, it's worse than ever. I'm currently trying to render a project that took 15 minutes to render about 3 weeks ago. I changed the music today and it froze 3 times on rendering, now it looks like it's working and the timer is saying 4hrs 30, it's already been going for an hour. Ram previews are also painful even at 1/4 res. It's beyond a joke now. 

[scrozier]

I have 256GB of ram... this is a joke. 

[SteveBlacker]

Another hopeless update. I have autoupdates for AE switched off, and it *still* updated itself. Not only that, it's been crashing and feezing constantly since then. Scripts that were working just fine no longer work properly (Motion 4, for example). What am I even paying for at this point? It gets worse and worse with each update, costing me time and, ultimately, money. Get it together Adobe. Rewrite it from the ground up, whatever. This is a farce. 

[JaimeGomez78]

Installed yesterday and today...rollback. Memory issues with simple proyects. Eating RAM doing nothing. I don´t understand really.

[֑nubnubbud]

AE was not developed with RAM or GPU's in mind, and now that both are plentiful, it hit AE like a certain narcotic blend in the 80's hit low income neighborhoods. It's not optimized for it, so it gobbles it all up for little to no (and sometimes negative) benefit, but it's the only way to go faster without an intervention (refactor/rewrite) and boy would that be a lot of technical debt to undo. Probably better off starting from scratch.

[Volition74au]

The new preset Backgrounds>Anime Speed Lines> Gives barely any lines. I have to adjust the parameters to get some lines. I rendered out a 15s sample and got Not 1 Speed line. I changed the random seed and got 1 in 15s . Seems a bit light on. I mean i am happy to change the parameters but I am guessing that is not the idea. I created it with a 1080x1080 comp and a 1920x1080 comp too

[OussK]

the Shadow Catcher feature looks good 🙂 so now we can create more realistic composition

[InfiniteWhale]

I look forward to seeing how much you've dropped the ball on this one, becuase the last version was SO slow with shape layers that it's practically unusable. It consistently takes over 30 seconds to copy and paste a shape layer, and is genuinely worse than the performance I got from AE 10 years ago