I disagree with Mylenium a bit. While there are a lot of things I would like to change about how AE works and I agree with him on some of what he said, there are some things that have been added to AE that make it much better for me and what I do since CS6. Some are little workflow things and some are major features. People use After Effects in many different ways, so what's useful to me might not be useful to Mylenium and what's useful to Mylenium, might not be useful to you. Buying CS6 outright can be quite expensive, so you should really look into this before you make a big purchase! I am going to list some of the changes that mattered to me and let you decide for yourself. GPU-acceleration of Fractal Noise is really useful - even on my old GPUs it's twice as fast to render some of my projects with Fractal Noise! And the faster interactivity makes it much easier while I'm in the creative stage. The ability for effects that reference other layers to reference the effects and masks in addition to the layer source has REALLY cut down on how much precomping I have to do and I can work much faster when I'm making changes since I don't have to keep diving in and out of precomps. (Talked about on this page under Effect Layer Input Options) Huge! The Copy with Property Links and the Copy with Relative Property links functionality is really handy. The introduction of the Refine Edge and Refine Soft Matte tools really made the Roto Brush much more useful. If you have to scale up, there are better scaling options like bicubic sampling and the Detail Preserving Upscale effect. The mask tracker (which tracks masks) is very handy - especially when coupled with the Effect compositing options which let you isolate effects to masks. They added a keyboard command to snap the anchor point to the center of a layer's contents. This is a tiny thing, but so helpful. I use this all the time! If you start editing in Premiere Pro instead of Vegas (which you might as well do if you get a CC subscription), you can make your lower thirds in AE and then edit the text and colors in Premiere later without having to render anything in AE. This is much improved over the old way! Plus it's a lot easier to get your edits from your NLE to AE. If you ever get into expressions, I really like the new expression error handling. Lumetri Color You can set up templates for folder structure in your output templates! A simple thing, but so time-saving in a production workflow. Improvements to Warp Stabilizer were good (and they made several), but the new Camera Shake Deblur effect does a LOT to rescue footage that would otherwise be unusable. You can have scopes in AE now! This was a big deal while you're color grading. Something nobody talks about is the new panel stacking/soloing business in CC 2015 and later. When you go to use it, choose the "All panels" workspace at first. It's GREAT if your working on smaller screens (like a laptop)! That's what I built my MacBook Pro's workspace off of. (My Windows workstation has four monitors, so I have an entirely different workspace for it!) In summary, I could not imagine having to go back to CS6. There are so many new features that have become indispensable to me! And I haven't even mentioned all the benefits of Creative Cloud outside of After Effects! I love the Capture mobile app. You can make color themes while you're out and about and they're waiting for you back inside your AE library on your computer when you get home. (You can also use it to create LUTs and several other tasks.) TypeKit gives you access to a bunch of great, otherwise expensive typeface families. The assets in the CC app (images, clipart, etc.) can be quite useful (not talking about Adobe Stock either) Ooh, and Character Animator is super fun just to play with even if you don't use it to work on anything. Again, we all work in different ways, so, if what I've said doesn't interest you, you could look at the full lists of things that have been added to After Effects and see if anything in there piques your interest: what’s new and changed in After Effects CC (12.0) After Effects CC (12.1): what’s new and changed in this October 2013 update After Effects CC (12.2): what’s new and changed in this December 2013 update what’s new and changed in After Effects CC 2014 (13.0) After Effects CC 2014.1 (13.1): what’s new and changed in this update After Effects CC 2014.2 (13.2): what’s new and changed in this update After Effects CC 2015 (13.5) is now available After Effects CC 2015 (13.6) and Character Animator (Preview 3) updates now available what’s new and changed in the After Effects CC 2015 (13.7) update What's new and changed in After Effects CC 2015.3 (13.8) update What’s New and Changed in After Effects CC 2017 (14.0) January 2017 Update to After Effects CC Is Now Available (14.1) After Effects CC (April 2017) In-Depth: New Features (14.2) Hopefully that helps you.
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