June 13, 2017 /  / Original Post on Adobe Blogs

Faster Motion Graphics templates and Illustrator file import

Earlier today, we released an update to the 2017 version of After Effects CC. This update, version 14.2.1, includes significant performance enhancements as well as bug fixes, and is recommended for all users.

Motion Graphics templates now render up to 4x faster, and Adobe Illustrator and PDF file import are much faster as well, especially for complex vector graphics. 14.2.1 also fixes several key issues, including “2 or more frames to play back” memory errors, Camera-Shake Deblur effect rendering above 8bpc, and copy-paste of Premiere Pro graphics objects into After Effects.

You can install the update through the Creative Cloud desktop application, or you can check for new updates from within any Creative Cloud application by choosing Help > Updates. Please note that it can take 24 hours or more for all of our global data centers to receive the update. If the update isn’t available for you right now, please check back later.

If you want to ask questions about these new and changed features, come on over to the After Effects Forums. That’s the best place for questions. Questions left in comments on a blog post are much harder to work with; the blog comment system just isn’t set up for conversations. If you’d like to submit feature requests or bug reports, you can do so at this page.

Performance improvements

  • We fixed the “Cached preview needs 2 or more frames to play back” memory allocation errors, caused by an incorrect estimate of free memory when After Effects attempted to render or preview frames. (Note that you will, however, still see this message if you attempt to preview a single frame.) These fixes should also enable you to preview longer stretches of your timeline.
  • Text rendering has been optimized. As a result, Dynamic Link rendering performance of After Effects compositions, including Motion Graphics templates and legacy text templates, is now significantly faster, up to 4x faster depending on the composition.
  • Importing Illustrator or PDF files, or opening a project containing those files, is now 3-4x faster for files with many layers or a very large number of vectors to parse.

Miscellaneous bug fixes

  • The Camera-Shake Deblur effect now renders correctly when the project color depth is set to 16-bpc or 32-bpc.
  • Buttons in ScriptUI panels have been reverted to the rectangular appearance seen in After Effects 14.1 and previous releases.
  • The Lumetri Scopes panel no longer displays at a reduced size on Windows when HiDPI display scaling is enabled.
  • Overbright pixels in 32-bpc compositions no longer lack a color cast, when appropriate, if the Hardware Accelerate Composition, Layer, and Footage Panels preference is enabled.
  • Opening a project that contains a missing JPEG sequence footage now reports the missing sequence correctly instead of “file ‘<folder name>’ cannot be imported this ‘????’ file is damaged or unsupported.”
  • The CINEMA 4D renderer no longer fails to render the frame or give an error, “CINEMA 4D Render Failed (5070::0)”, if you enable motion blur when the Composition panel is set to an orthographic 3D view.
  • Changing Brightness in Preferences > Appearance no longer leaves some parts of the user interface at the previous brightness until you restart After Effects. Note that CEP panel tabs, such as the Libraries panel, still have this problem; we are investigating this remaining problem for a future release.

After Effects – Premiere Pro interoperability improvements:

  • The sample Motion Graphics templates installed by After Effects have been updated so that they no longer fail to render correctly in Premiere Pro if After Effects is installed in a non-English language.
  • Text layers in a Premiere Pro graphic object now include tracking, kerning, and tsume values when they are brought into After Effects. Also, vertical text is no longer changed to horizontal text.
  • Shape layers in a Premiere Pro graphic with the fill attribute disabled no longer have a red fill when they are brought into After Effects.
  • Premiere Pro graphic objects that have effects applied between graphic object layers now replicate the effects on adjustment layers when they are brought into After Effects. A similar problem with masks is solved by replicating the mask as a track matte. Also, keyframes at frame zero in the graphic object are no longer adjusted forward one frame.
  • Premiere Pro graphic object layers with their visibility eyeballs disabled no longer have their visibility re-enabled when they are brought into After Effects.
  • Bars and Tone and HD Bars and Tone clips in a Premiere Pro project are now replicated as a placeholder footage object instead of a solid layer when they are brought into After Effects. (Note that the audio tone is still not included, you can add the Tone effect to manually replicate that.)

Team Projects fixes

  • Team Projects no longer prevents footage from being deleted from the project if a composition or sequence has a dependency on the footage.
  • Team Projects no longer flags a footage item as needing to be shared if the only change was that the footage was relinked to the same source media.

Scripting and Expressions fixes

  • The AVItem.setProxyToNone() scripting method no longer fails with an error message, “After Effects error: AEGP trying to add invalid footage”.
  • The system.callSystem() scripting method now waits for all tasks called by the command to complete, instead of failing when the command takes a long time to complete.
  • Enabling expressions for a property on macOS 10.12 using the Option+Shift+= (equals sign) keyboard shortcut no longer replaces the default expression with the ± (plus-minus sign) character.

 

Victoria Nece

Victoria Nece is the Product Manager for motion graphics and visual effects. In a previous life, she was a motion designer for documentaries, as well as a developer of scripts and extensions for After Effects.