What is Adobe After Effects

What is Adobe After Effects

Adobe® After Effects® is a professional special effects software for creating insdustry standard visual effects. It simplifies and accelerates the motion graphics workflow with an amazing 3D ray-traced rendering engine based on NVIDIA® OptiX™ technology.

Share

Tweet

features

After Effects CC (2015)

Jun 15 2015

Find the perfect image or graphic for your project

Save time finding, licensing, and managing royalty-free stock images and graphics now that After Effects CC integrates with the new Adobe Stock service. Once you save an image to your Creative Cloud Libraries, it's immediately available for use in your compositions and other creative projects.
See how it works ›

Your assets, available anywhere

Access and share important creative assets — like Looks and graphics — via Creative Cloud Libraries that are available in After Effects, Premiere Pro, Photoshop, and Illustrator; mobile apps like Shape; and services like Adobe Stock.
See how it works ›

Preview without interruptions

Adjust a composition's properties and even resize panels without interrupting playback. Uninterrupted preview keeps up with your creativity.
See how it works ›

Track faces with greater accuracy

The Face Tracker makes it easy to apply effects to select areas of faces. Use simple tracking to color correct or blur a face; track specific points to change eye color or mouth movements; or track measurements, such as how wide an eye is open. You can even export data to Adobe Character Animator.
See how it works ›

Real 3D inside After Effects

Import 3D Objects and use them in your 3D scenes thanks to a live 3D pipeline with Cinema 4D. No re-rendering, no waiting. Just more creating.
See how it works ›

Preview the way that works best for you

Preview compositions, layers, and footage based on your experience and preferences. Choose intuitive default behaviors, create customized previews for different triggers, or revert to legacy preview behaviors with a few clicks.

Adapt the UI to your preferences

Navigate panels faster thanks to streamlined panel groups. Adjust the brightness of interactive controls to get the contrast just right.

Optimize the UI for touch

In the first steps toward a more touch-friendly compositing environment, After Effects makes it easier to navigate between panels in a group by letting you choose and activate panels with touch-optimized controls.

And so much more

Also includes: Enhancements that save time when working with expressions, the ability to import JPEG2000 files, and more.Learn more ›

After Effects CC (2014.1)

Oct 06 2014

Refined user interface with HiDPI support

A simplified UI puts the focus on your projects and delivers a more consistent experience across devices, including HiDPI Windows 8.1 displays.

Enhanced 3D Pipeline

Work with 3D elements faster now that After Effects includes CINEWARE 2.0 and offers CINEMA 4D R16 compatibility, plus improved layer support. 

Improved Adobe Anywhere collaboration

Collaborate on compositions and productions with other After Effects artists without worrying about what to name files or where to store them. Version tracking and project sharing features make remote workflows a breeze.

And so much more

Also includes: More visible anchor points on layers, tracking behavior improvements, and more.
See full release notes ›

After Effects CC (2014)

Jun 18 2014

Keying effects

Preserve fine detail when keying compressed or poorly shot blue-screen or green-screen footage. Use the Advanced Spill Suppressor to control the amount of green spill left in green-screen footage.See how it works › 

Live Text Templates for Premiere Pro

Package your After Effects compositions as Live Text templates so Premiere Pro editors can change the text without changing the text color, motion, or lower-third background.See how it works ›

Flexible masking options and Premiere Pro Interchange

Use masks to apply effects to specific areas of your compositions — no need for additional adjustment or track matte layers — and blend each effect individually into the original layer. Import masks from Premiere Pro via Dynamic Link for further refinement.See how it works ›

Kuler integration

Create color themes using the Adobe Kuler app on your iPhone or in your browser, and then sync your swatches to After Effects for use in your compositions.

Mercury Transmit

Get full-screen previews of your composites on a separate monitor. Send previews over interfaces like HDMI from a graphics card without additional hardware.

Media Browser enhancements

Navigate your media locally or across a network via Adobe Anywhere, and access complex media types like P2 and XDCAM as media, not as nested folders.

Typekit integration

Access a variety of fonts from Typekit for immediate use in your After Effects projects.See how it works ›

Panel integration support

Find and install plug-ins, extensions, training media, and other content via After Effects panels created by the developer community.

And so much more

Also includes: Faster performance in the Warp Stabilizer VFX effect; the ability to import Sony RAW footage from F5, F55, and F65 cameras; scripting access to render settings and output module settings; and more.See full release notes ›

After Effects CC (12.2)

Dec 13 2013

Faster, customizable output

Reduce file management clutter and organize your images with new customization of output file name and path templates.

Improved snapping

Layer and mask snapping behavior makes aligning both 2D and 3D objects simple, without needing to calculate and type in values. Now snap items to shape paths, bounding boxes, cameras, and lights, and within shape layers.See how it works ›

Scripting enhancements

New script enhancements make it possible to automate output to various formats by using scripts to change render and output module.

Migrate settings

Migrate your settings such as workspace, preferences, and keyboard shortcuts from pervious versions of After Effects CC to your current version.

And so much more

Also included: Bezier paths for shape layers; the ability to use the Reload Footage command with missing footage; a new maximum value of 200 for the Brush Size properties in the Stroke and Write-on effects; and more.See full release notes ›

After Effects CC (12.1)

Oct 31 2013

Mask Tracker

Quickly create masks and add effects that travel throughout a scene, avoiding hours of manual adjustment. Draw a mask around an object and it follows the object across frames, automatically adjusting position, rotation, scale, skew, and perspective as it goes.See how it works ›

Flexible scaling options

Make every pixel looks its best, with your choice of bilinear and bicubic resampling. Use the detail-preserving Upscale effect to maintain quality and sharpness when transforming SD footage into HD, or turning HD into digital-cinema 4K.See how it works ›

Property links

Copy and paste an effect, mask, or other properties from one layer to another so that the pasted instance has a live link to the original. Changes that you make to the original properties are reflected in the linked instances.See how it works ›

Faster Warp Stabilizer and 3D Camera Tracker

Analyze your footage up to 80% faster with new speed enhancements added to both the Warp Stablizer VFX and the 3D Camera Tracker.See how it works ›

HiDPI content viewers for Retina displays on Mac computers

After Effects will now take advantage of a Retina display on a Mac computer to show each pixel of content in a viewer as a single pixel on the display.

Improved snapping

Layer and mask snapping behavior makes aligning both 2D and 3D objects simple, without needing to calculate and type in values. Now snap items to individual layers in a precomposition and to lines defined by a layer's boundaries, even outside of the layer itself, making alignment easier.

GPU optimizations

Work faster with GPU optimizations. Enhancements in the ray-traced 3D renderer enable you to quickly work with extruded text and shapes. Inclusion of the NVIDIA OptiX 3.0 library improves performance and stability for the ray-traced 3D renderer.

Media Browser

Access and manage assets with this convenient, dockable panel. Quickly browse, open, and composite virtually any video format. Link to traditional movie, image, and audio files, as well as industry-standard storage media like P2 cards, RED, XDCAM, and ARRIRAW.

Adobe Anywhere integration

Collaborate on composites and animations with team members. Use the new Media Browser in After Effects to browse and open shared productions on the Anywhere server. Easily share compositions and media, and manage historical versions of shared work.

And so much more

Also includes: New properties in the Expression Language Menu; rectified audio waveforms; changes and enhancements to layers; changes to mask path drawing; and more.See full release notes ›

After Effects CC (12)

Jun 13 2013

Live 3D Pipeline

Objects and scenes from popular 3D modeling and animation software CINEMA 4D can be used directly as footage inside After Effects CC without rendering first. This eases roundtripping between the programs and opens up numerous creative possibilities.See how it works ›

Refine Edge tool

It's the end of hard matte lines. Keep the details when separating complicated foreground elements like frizzy hair or motion-blurred edges from complex backgrounds. This means you can create natural-looking composites without keying specially shot footage.See how it works ›

Track Optimization in the 3D Camera Tracker

The enhanced Camera Tracker in After Effects introduces Track Optimization which allows users to refine tracking points over time to gain more accurate 3D tracking in 2D space.See how it works ›

Warp Stabilizer VFX

A major upgrade to the much-loved Warp Stabilizer, VFX lets you choose which objects in a scene get stabilized, reverse a stabilization, and preserve a scene's original scale to fix tricky shots, like aerial fly-throughs.See how it works ›

Search feature for missing fonts, effects, and footage

Never hunt for missing fonts, effects, or footage used in your comps again. With the new search feature, missing fonts, effects, and other media are easily identified and found within your compositions, enabling you to relink them easily.See how it works ›

Snapping

Easily align edges, anchor points, and mask paths between layers when constructing complex objects with the new layer and mask snapping feature.See how it works ›

Bicubic resampling

Choose between bicubic and bilinear sampling for selected layers, which determines how pixels are sampled for transformations such as scaling.See how it works ›

Pixel Motion Blur

Add or enhance motion blur for moving objects in live footage and rendered scenes. You can use this effect to add realism, exaggerate movement, match shots, and make stuttery footage easier to watch.See how it works ›

Sync Settings

Synchronize all workspace settings in Creative Cloud to make working across multiple computers or setting up a new computer easier than ever.

And so much more

Also included: New Send to Adobe Media Encoder queue commands; the ability to use the Adobe Media Encoder queue for H.264, MPEG-2, and WMV formats; the ability to purge both RAM and disk caches with a single command; and more.See full release notes ›

Compare older versions ›

After Effects forum: https://forums.adobe.com/community/aftereffects_general_discussion

About projects

An After Effects project is a single file that stores compositions and references to all of the source files used by footage items in that project. Compositions are collections of layers. Many layers use footage items (such as movies or still images) as a source, though some layers—such as shape layers and text layers—contain graphics that you create within After Effects.

A project file has the filename extension .aep or .aepx. A project file with the .aep filename extension is a binary project file. A project file with the .aepx filename extension is a text-based XML project file.

The name of the current project appears at the top of the application window.

   A template project file has the filename extension .aet.