I know I was busy working yesterday as I didn’t see about this release until last night, but for Adobe Max they have updated After Effects, and already the Select Track Matte Layers is included! WOOHOO!!!
Select Track Matte Layers is the signature feature that will help clean up every timeline. Instead of having to have a track matte in the layer above every layer, you can use a single Track Matte layer and pick whip it to layer you need. And you can change it from alpha to luma with a button and invert the matte with a second button.
The only thing that could make this better would be sticky folders, so you could put all your track mattes in a folder and stick it to the top or bottom (and even better if you could have 2 timelines showing, so you could keep some of them locked to the top of your tracks, but that is all wishful thinking.
Anyway, Select Track Matte Layers is going to be just a huge time saver and organization saver.
Native H.264 Encoding has returned, it used to work through quicktime, but now it is back and native.
Composition Presets have been revamped and include social media platform sizes (though why is their only a 24p 1080 instead of 23.976?).
New Animation Presets, they have added 50 new presets, with a lot of changeable controls and new text animation controls.
Faster Timeline Navigation, is a simple thing that should have been in there years ago! Thank you adobe. Basically if you select a layer, the J and K keys just move along it if you hold down shift, or you can select a single property.
Cinema 4D Optional Installer instead of automatically installing the light version.
And Currently in Beta Features added.
3D Model Import, you can now import 3D models directly into your composition without additional plugins.
Properties Panel, allows quick access to important properties of selected shapes in the timeline (anything to get faster).
OpenColorIO and ACES Color Management.
These are not flashy new features, but to me these are some of the biggest updates to my daily life I have ever seen.
