After Effects CS6: All the New Features

At the NAB 2012, Adobe unveiled Production Premium CS6, part of the upcoming Creative Cloud offering. It’s the perfect opportunity to explore all the new features in After Effects CS6! For more details on the rest of the suite, check out the official page.

Native 3D Extrusion for Text and Shape Layers

Finally! You can now give real depth to text and shape layers with just one click. Thanks to a brand-new ray-traced 3D rendering engine, After Effects now includes one of the most-requested features: native, easy 3D extrusion. And it does it well! You can extrude text while keeping its animation properties intact. New material controls let you add reflections, refraction, transparency, environments, and bevels. The creative potential unlocked by this new render engine is huge — and I can’t wait to make new tutorials showing it in action!
To get a concrete idea of what’s possible, check out this demo from Motionworks:

Native 3D Camera Tracker

After Effects now includes its own 3D camera tracker, eliminating the need for third-party plugins or external software. It automatically analyzes your video to create a virtual 3D camera that matches the real one. Just select your footage, click to solve the camera, and the analysis runs in the background — you can keep working while AE calculates the motion.

You can select tracking points directly in the viewer to create layers at the correct positions in 3D space. A new Shadow Catcher option also allows shadows to be cast realistically onto existing footage. You can now recreate the iconic Fringe titles entirely within After Effects!

Here’s a short demo by Maltaannon showing the new 3D tracker in action:

Per-Vertex Mask Feather Control

Another long-awaited feature: the ability to control individual feather points on a mask. This will make life easier for compositors and VFX artists, as it eliminates the need for multiple masks to handle areas requiring both sharp and soft edges.

Global Performance Cache

Perhaps the most noticeable improvement in daily use — speed! After Effects CS6 is set to be the most efficient and powerful version ever, featuring several new technologies that boost performance:

Global RAM Cache

After Effects now saves every rendered frame in RAM, both at the composition and layer level.
For example: after a RAM preview, if you disable a layer or effect, AE will quickly re-render that change. Re-enable it, and it will instantly recall the cached frames — no need to recompute. This makes your workflow far more fluid, allowing quick experimentation without constant re-renders.
Cached frames are reused wherever possible — even duplicated comps and looping expressions will pull from existing cached data.

Persistent Disk Cache

After Effects now also stores cached frames on disk, allowing it to restore your previews when reopening a project. Perfect if you switch between projects throughout the day — no more waiting to re-render! AE automatically decides whether recalculating or loading cached frames from disk is faster.
Just make sure you have a fast drive with plenty of space to fully benefit from this.

New Graphics Pipeline

Major improvements have been made to OpenGL and GPU handling — essential for running the new ray-traced 3D renderer smoothly. Interface performance and layer manipulation in the viewer are noticeably faster and more responsive. Depending on your setup, After Effects CS6 can be up to 16× faster than the previous version!

Other New Features

• Improved integration with Adobe Illustrator. .ai and .eps files can now be converted to shape layers in one click, keeping editable paths and allowing extrusion and animation.
• Rolling Shutter Repair for DSLR footage, based on Warp Stabilizer technology.
• Updated and new effects, including the CycoreFX HD suite in 16 and 32-bit!
• Import Avid and Final Cut Pro 7 projects via Pro Import AE.
• Launch mocha directly from within the app.
• Many other small improvements — see this article for the full list.
• In short: CS6 is shaping up to be a fantastic release!

See you in a few weeks! For more info, visit the official page and follow After Effects on Twitter!

Bonus

Below is an example created with the excellent Newton physics simulator for After Effects, showcasing the new 3D capabilities:

[vimeo video_id="40217118"]