Adobe has revealed the new features they’ll be showing off at NAB. Here’s some of what’s new in After Effects:
- Cinema 4D Lite and live 3D pipeline between Cinema 4D and After Effects
- The Refine Edge tool, which adds crazy good soft edge matting to the already amazing Roto Brush.
- Snapping. This doesn’t sound big, but it actually is. Make a cube in seconds rather than minutes.
- Bicubic resampling. Ahem. Finally.
Read more here. And here’s a good rundown of what’s new in Premiere—looks like they focused on solid usability features rather than glitz, which is great to see.
Now, back to After Effects. Cinema 4D Lite will be bundled with this “next” version, and you’ll be able to create a C4D scene right from within AE. You create the 3D animation in C4D, but you can change your view on the scene using the AE camera. Then, when you render your After Effects project, the C4D scene is rendered on-the-fly. This is not just a welcome simplification of the standard render-import-render workflow, it puts powerful 3D features into any After Effects session. Pretty cool.
Creative Cloud subscribers will get these new features as soon as they are released, which, I suspect, will create a lot of warm, fuzzy feelings about the whole software-as-a-subscription model.
A big, personal congrats to my friends on the After Effects team. Nice work all!