After Effects Roundup August 2023

Rich Young

8 months ago

Adobe announced Updated system requirements for After Effects Beta 24.0. This includes the 24.0 versions of After Effects, Audition, Character Animator, Media Encoder, and Premiere Pro. The final release of After Effects 24.0 will not support Rosetta on Apple silicon, but will support the architecture specific versions of 24.0. There’s more on new features in the feature focus links below and in AE Help pages.

Victoria Nece alerted MOGRT makers to a big update to browsing and managing templates that just went into Premiere Pro Beta. See Now in Beta: Improved Browsing in the Essential Graphics panel by Adobe’s Annika

Victoria also noted that more type fun for After Effects scripters just went into public beta, with new scripting hooks to let you access and replace fonts, complete with a handy sample panel. See New Scripting Hooks for Variable Fonts and New Text Scripting Hooks for Font Replacement by Sébastien Périer.

A major 3D update to After Effects Beta went live in early August. Adobe introduced physically-based 3D rendering and image-based lighting and shadows, with a new Environment light type. For details, see Feature Focus: Major changes to 3D model rendering and lighting and a new 3D FAQ by Tim Kurkoski. It’s perhaps too early to expect flexibility and quality equal to Element 3D!

Happily, we have Jake In Motion to demo in MAJOR updates for 3D in After Effects!

Also in early August, Catie Bass shared Next-Gen RotoBrush: Now Available in the After Effects Beta!

Results and opinions of this Beta feature were somewhat mixed. Olufemii has hopeful thoughts in a video intro and a comparison, Is Rotobrush 3.0 Overhyped? and After Effects Is Getting CRAZY Again.

Adobe Basics has some tidbits on After Effects 23.6 UPDATE | What’s NEW?

Jeff Foster posted a couple of AI-related pieces here on PVC. AI Tools: Animations with Midjourney & After Effects is a breakdown of an animation technique using Midjourney 5.2 Zoom renders and Adobe After Effects. Jeff also shared his update AI Tools Part 4: The Latest for Video, Film Production, 3D, Audio and more.

Chris Zwar on PVC posted After Effects and Syntheyes for advanced screen replacements, after the surprise absorption of SynthEyes into BorisFX.

After Effects and Syntheyes for advanced screen replacements

Mark Christiansen is back after a long break with Is AI video about to creep out of the uncanny valley? Mark evaluates Runway Gen-2 Image-to-Video and sees a noticeable improvement compared to the alternatives.

Is AI video about to creep out of the uncanny valley?

In the Secret to Making Real 3D Text in After Effects, Aharon Rabinowitz for School of Motion shows you how AE in the last several years has become easier for creating real 3D text. 3D text in After Effects had long been a cottage industry, generating oodles of workarounds, pseudo 3D methods, scripts, new technology, licensing deals, and an array of 3rd-party plug-ins.

Max Novak shared a a breakdown and step by step guide behind a new music video in A$AP Rocky – “RIOT” FULL TUTORIAL & BREAKDOWN | Adobe After Effects, Photoshop, Blender.

david van brink, an original QuickTime guy as I remember, resurfaced with Omino Lua for After Effects, a MacOS plug-in that lets you write Lua programs to draw images into each frame of a composition. This is a fully-functioning prerelease.

#aftereffects #lua We have a new Plugin in prerelease, "omino lua". You can write a lua script to render each frame of your After Effects comp! https://t.co/MvWq4l6yFM pic.twitter.com/LPAEgkEZ6F

— david van brink (@polyomino) September 1, 2023