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Hello, Victoria Nece here. I’m the new Product Manager for Motion Graphics and Visual Effects at Adobe, taking over for Todd Kopriva. Todd’s been a tremendous resource and a strong advocate for After Effects and this whole community. We wish him well on his new adventures.

Before joining Adobe, I was the Director of Animation at the Documentary Group in New York, as well as an independent author of scripts and extensions. I’ve been an After Effects user most of my life: I’ve been doing motion design, titles, maps, data visualizations, and all kinds of post production work for what feels like forever. In the last few years I’ve become a developer too, writing code for After Effects automation, motion capture, and workflow customization. After Effects has always been at the core of my creative work, and I’ll be bringing my perspective as a user to the job.

I’ve been joking that I talked about After Effects so much they decided to pay me to do it, but there’s more to it than that: my job is really to make your work life better. I know how After Effects can make some seemingly impossible tasks quick and easy and fun. I know how other things it does can make you crazy; they’ve frustrated me too, and I want to help ease some of those pain points.

Since I’ve come on board, it’s been exciting to see all the great things the After Effects team has in store for future releases. (More than a few “I’ve been wanting this for years!” features.) Character Animator is getting more powerful every day, too, and their roadmap promises lots of new ways to create fast, expressive animation.

I love this community. It’s full of creative, talented people with great ideas for the future of the industry, and I’m looking forward to meeting many more of you. I couldn’t be happier to have joined the team.

Having worked together with Director Ridley Scott and Production Designer Arthur Max on Prometheus, Territory, a design studio that works on a range of motion projects including feature films, brand work, and popular video games, was asked to create the screen graphics for The Martian, recently nominated for an Oscar® for Best Achievement in Visual Effects. Although both films are set in space, The Martian is predicated on real science, and ‘authenticity’ was key to the creative.

Credit: Courtesy of Giles Keyte

When Territory’s team, led by Creative Director David Sheldon-Hicks and Ar Director Marti Romances, broke down the script, they realized that story-led motion graphics would be a constant presence in every scene, helping to explain, clarify, or direct the dialogue and the action.

Here, Marti takes us behind the scenes, sharing the creative process so we can understand how Creative Cloud and After Effects CC helped the team achieve the stunning graphics that feature in the film.

Project overview
There were 8 key sets, including Mission Control, the Hermes spaceship, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Mars Ascent Vehicle (M.A.V.), HABitat facility on Mars, Mars Rovers, NASA offices, Pathfinder, and smaller projects for the Space Suit Arm Computers and Crew personal laptops.

Each set featured hundreds of screens, most of which needed to be animated, and I created visual design languages to help differentiate each set. From there, my team of designers, animators, and 3D artists began to create content.

Adobe Creative Cloud was with us every step of the way, with Illustrator CC, Photoshop CC and After Effects forming the backbone of our creative tools, helping us to bring our concepts to life and make our time more effective.

Overcoming challenges
The biggest challenge we faced was to find the best ways to combined real science, stunning design, and dramatic storytelling. Our graphics had to represent complex scientific information very clearly so that the audience could understand and keep up with plot twists. At the same time, we had to make sure that the science was still credible and met with NASA’s approval.

My approach to a project of this scale is to create all the user interfaces in Adobe Illustrator first, and then animate all the windows and widgets in After Effects. Building the graphics in a non-destructible mode (being able to scale it up and down without losing pixel quality) was key, as we knew we were going to be repurposing lots of the graphics in different aspect ratios.

CREDIT: Territory Studio

We also knew that many of the screens required interactions or animations to tie into story points, so we designed the graphics with movement in mind. We looked carefully at the UX of the interfaces that we ‘reimagined’ for the story to make sure that the choreography felt right in terms of ease of use and expected function.

CREDIT: Courtesy Twentieth Century Fox

An authentic Mission Control
Mission Control was the biggest set and featured around 100 screens, including a bank of LED monitors 18m x 6m. Ridley and Arthur were very clear that the Mission Control screens (NASA and JPL) needed to look real and work authentically.

CREDIT: Courtesy Twentieth Century Fox

One of the film’s key scenes plays out in Mission Control so it was essential that we got the balance right between factual screen content and visual design. Each screen has a real purpose in that context and we needed to make sure that our work reflected that. And it was important to give a unique identity to the set, which features a lot of information, including realistic video feeds and telemetry data for the actors to react to and interact with.

Creating a visual language
To be able to create a visual language to wrap those realistic elements in, I researched NASA’s current data and interface conventions, and how data was prioritised and when, how that was organized and depicted on screen and in the Mission Control space, how crew interacted with it, what commands were given, and how that changed the data display. We also talked to NASA about how they think that will evolve over the next 20 years.

I then began to visualize how to bring all that data, which in real life is displayed in a mix of styles, formats and screens, together. I applied information architecture principles to the interface designs, and thought about data priorities and the user experience. I wanted to achieve a consistent UI design that could work for NASA in real life.

CREDIT: Territory Studio

Out of the possible routes we suggested, Arthur chose the combination that was very true to the data requirements and the spirit of NASA’s current Mission Control, and yet pushed 20 years forward.

CREDIT: Territory Studio

The backgrounds were black and dark blue with white fonts and light blue indicators. Red was used to highlight mission critical data and indicate warning status. The overall look of the interface is serious and authoritarian, but the hierarchy of information is clearly readable to tie in with story points.

Animation ref: Martian NASA Mission Control 02
https://vimeo.com/141030801

With hundreds of animations playing concurrently, After Effects played a key role in bringing the UI to life within the context of the action. I would say the best thing was the ability to export every single layer from Illustrator to After Effects and animate them as we wanted to. They were couple designs and having everything organised was key.

CREDIT: Territory Studio

The 2D graphs on the right hand side were also Illustrator paths transformed into After Effects paths so we could animate the bezier points in After Effects. The “Numbers” native effect was very useful when replicating timecodes like the countdown for the missions or (again) for the amount of running numbers in the left hand side.

Designing for The Hermes spaceship
The Hermes space ship was another key set. For the Hermes screens, UI Art Director Felicity Hickson wanted a twist on the typical spacecraft avionic designs. Again, NASA’s reference material for the relevant technology and science led the design of the console screens, but as we were designing for a ‘near future’ spaceship, we also looked at what SpaceX are doing to push the designs a bit further.

We ended up with a good set using different dark tones on the backgrounds (dark blues, purples and greens) and very vivid and bright colours (mainly whites and bright screens) for the data and buttons on those screens.

Martian HERMES Purnell Orbits 01
https://vimeo.com/141025171

Again, the Hermes screens were all displaying mission critical status information, be that engineering schematics of the Hermes itself, or of operations performed by its equipment.

CREDIT: Territory Studio

After Effects really stood out for its ability to help us achieve the simplicity of the main graphs for the orbits, such as the ones in the top left corner of the above screen, plus all the rest of the running numbers animated using the “Numbers” effect native from After Effects. The Posterise Time effects helped a lot too when trying to replicate a slightly delayed update of information from the satellites, receiving information not instantly but a bit phased (by 15 or 20 frames per second). So we could animate everything smoothly and later on apply the Posterise Time effect to down the time of the refresh on the animation by the same values for the rest of animations on that screen (i.e., numbers, graphs etc.).

CREDIT: Territory Studio

Insights from Designer and Animator Daniel Højlund
Expressions offer a great way to establish a lot of extra animation control in After Effects, and we used it occasionally to help drive certain animation like number values and relationship between different layer properties. Building a rig with Expression controls linked up to multiple layer properties, also help us ensure certain animation patterns and feel to stay consistent across screens. It was a very time efficient way to generate some of the more generic animation elements for quick turnarounds with the use of fairly simple expressions.

Also, the pipeline between Illustrator and After Effects is much improved and very useful. Designing the graphic elements in Illustrator and importing them into After Effects, made it easy to go back into Illustrator to make design adjustments, and then have those elements live update in After Effects. It is a much faster and sufficient way of working with Illustrator layers, which was very handy for us on more than a few occasions.

The fact the screens were not just set dressing but ‘mission critical’ and necessary to both story and credibility added to the pressure, but ultimately the satisfaction. And once the screens were programmed by Compuhire, our on-set playback partners, they really brought the sets to life and it was great to see the actors performing with live screens on-set.

 

The After Effects CC 2015 (13.7) update is now available.

For details of the updates for all Adobe professional video and audio applications and services, see this page. Also, in January 2016 Adobe Stock added over 100,000 4K high-quality video assets, which you can search for, download, and license in the Libraries panel in After Effects and Premiere Pro.

If you’re a Creative Cloud subscriber, you can download the new version by checking for updates through the Creative Cloud desktop application. For information about purchasing a Creative Cloud subscription, see this page about plans and this page with current promotional offers.

Please, if you want to ask questions about these new and changed features, come on over to the After Effects user-to-user forum. 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 here.

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summary of what’s new in the After Effects CC 2015 (13.7) update

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• Maxon CINEWARE 3.0
• new preference to auto-save when starting the render queue
• improvements to Cache Before Playback previews
• … and many bug fixes

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Maxon CINEWARE 3.0

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Maxon’s CINEWARE plug-in for After Effects has been updated to version 3.0, and includes the following features:

• Live Link, which synchronizes the timelines in After Effects and Cinema 4D (R17 SP2)
• support for the Cinema 4D Take System (R17)
• extract .c4d timeline markers
• other enhancements and fixes

CINEWARE 3.0 also includes the following rendering improvements:

• OpenGL renderer
• renderer limitations have been removed: Physical, Hardware, and Sketch and Toon renderers will now render using CINEWARE
• multi-pass alpha channels

You will need Cinema 4D R17 to use the Take System, and Cinema 4D R17.048 (SP2) to use Live Link. Even if you don’t have access to Cinema 4D R17, the rest of the new features can be used with After Effects and Cinema 4D versions R14-R16, including the version of Cinema 4D Lite R16 included with After Effects CC 2015.

Live Link

Live Link enables the timelines of Cinema 4D and After Effects to be synchronized. Live Link requires Cinema 4D R17.048 (SP2) or later. If the selected version of Cinema 4D does not support Live Link, the Enable button will be greyed out.

To use Live Link, ensure that the Cinema 4D paths in the CINEWARE Options dialog is set to a version of Cinema 4D that supports Live Link (Cinema 4D R17.048 or later). When you click the Enable button for Live Link (under the Show help button), the specified Cinema 4D version will open the current file. If Live Link has not been enabled in Cinema 4D, brief instructions will appear. To enable Live Link in Cinema 4D, choose Edit > Preferences > Communication > Live Link, then enable Live Link Enabled At Startup. The timelines will now be synchronized when switching between After Effects and Cinema 4D. When you select a different C4D layer in After Effects, press Enable to synchronize that layer.

Take System

The Cinema 4D R17 Take System has been integrated into CINEWARE. The Set Take button in the CINEWARE effect will be enabled if the .c4d file contains takes. If the current renderer does not support take selections then the main take will be used.

extract .c4d timeline markers

Timeline markers in .c4d files are now added to the C4D layer in After Effects when you click the Extract button.

Note: To avoid problems extracting scene data in After Effects, enable Save Polygons for Melange and Save Animation for Melange in Cinema 4D preferences.

OpenGL renderer

The CINEWARE renderer can now be set to OpenGL.

renderer limitations removed for Physical, Hardware, and Sketch and Toon

Renderer limitations have been removed in CINEWARE. When your .c4d file has been saved in a full retail (e.g., Studio) version of Cinema 4D with Render Settings set to the Physical or Hardware renderer, it will render with those settings when the CINEWARE renderer is set to Standard (Final) or Standard (Draft). Sketch and Toon will render when the CINEWARE renderer is set to Standard (Final).

Note that this limitation is only removed for CINEWARE. The version of Cinema 4D Lite included with After Effects CC 2015 is not affected by this change and still has limitations on which renderers it can use.

multi-pass alpha channels

Multi-pass layers are now created with an alpha channel.

Synchronize C4D Layers

When the Cinema 4D Layers option is enabled, a new option to Synchronize C4D Layers becomes available when there are multiple instances (including extracted passes) of the C4D layer in the composition. All instances of the same layer with Synchronize C4D Layers enabled will synchronize changes made when enabling or disabling Cinema 4D layers by clicking Set Layers.

Note the difference between the two synchronize options in CINEWARE:

• Synchronize AE layer: Render Settings and Camera options are synchronized on all instances of the C4D layer.
• Synchronize C4D Layers: Cinema 4D Layers settings are synchronized on all instances the C4D layer.

other changes in CINEWARE

The No Pre-calculation option is now enabled by default. This disables pre-calculations for computing motion dynamics or particle simulations. You may need to disable No Pre-calculation for final rendering, depending on the animation used in the .c4d file.

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new preference to auto-save when starting the render queue

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In Preferences > Auto-Save, you can now control whether After Effects automatically saves the project when you start the render queue. The new Save When Starting Render Queue option is enabled by default.

This new option is a separate control from auto-saving at intervals (“Save every X minutes”). The Auto-Save options have been modified to make it clear that you can choose to save at intervals, save when starting the render queue, or both.

Starting in After Effects CC 2015 (13.6), auto-saving does not occur while the render queue is rendering. In After Effects CC 2015 (13.6), if Automatically Save Projects was enabled in Preferences > Auto-Save, projects were always auto-saved when you started the render queue; After Effects CC 2015 (13.7) now allows you to control whether or not this auto-save occurs.

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improvements to Cache Before Playback previews

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When the Cache Before Playback option is enabled in the Preview panel, After Effects CC 2015 (13.7) now previews frames as they are rendered. As the frames are rendered, only newly rendered frames are previewed; previously rendered frames are skipped. Audio is not previewed during this caching phase of the preview.

After all frames are rendered, preview of the cached frames begins (with audio, if enabled).

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notable bug fixes

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• Resizing a panel by dragging panel borders with a tablet pen (e.g. a Wacom tablet) no longer causes the pointer to continue to drag the panel border the next time you touch the pen down, or to unexpectedly begin dragging after a single click.
• Zooming with the mouse wheel in a Composition panel set to multiple views will again zoom the view under the pointer as expected, instead of only zooming the first view.
• Audio is no longer silent for the first 2 seconds of real-time playback of previews after the composition has been fully cached, if the Mute Audio When Preview Is Not Real-time preference is enabled. Important: This fixed bug addresses a specific problem in which audio did not engage when the playback frame rate is real-time; we are continuing to investigate a similar bug some users are experiencing where the preview of a cached composition starts out slower than real-time, and ramps up to real-time after a similar delay (~2-3 seconds). In this case, if Mute Audio When Preview Is Not Real-time is enabled, you will not hear audio during until the preview frame rate is real-time; you can work around this bug by disabling Mute Audio When Preview Is Not Real-time.
• Audio no longer plays out of sync if the frame rate of the comp or footage is different than the Frame Rate option in the Preview panel.
• Visual artifacts no longer occur in layers that use time remapping with frame blending set to Pixel Motion, or with Timewarp, Rolling Shutter Repair, and other effects that use the Pixel Motion (optical flow) method.
• Antialiasing in viewer panels (Composition, Layer, Footage) is improved when downsampling (e.g., viewer resolution is set to full and zoom is set to 25%) and the Hardware Accelerate Composition, Layer, and Footage Panels option is enabled in Preferences > Display.
• Layers draw their contents as expected, instead of a wireframe, when you hold the Option (Mac OS) or Alt (Windows) key while dragging the anchor point with the Pan Behind tool.
• Fixed several cases where the render progress bar in the Composition panel failed to appear or update as expected after modifying a composition.
• Resetting a workspace to its saved layout no longer opens empty Timeline panels.
• The Paint workspace now opens the Paint and Brushes panels instead of the Character and Paragraph panels.
• Audio-only previews no longer restore the workspace when the Timeline panel or other non-viewer panels are maximized.
• Choosing Replace With After Effects Composition in Premiere Pro no longer fails with an error, “Importer reported a generic error”, if the Premiere Pro sequence is set to greater than 99fps. Note that while the new composition in After Effects will be at the expected frame rate, changing that composition’s settings will reduce its frame rate to 99fps. (99fps is the maximum value allowed by the Composition Settings dialog. This bug fix behaves similar to dragging footage that is greater than 99fps to the New Composition button at the bottom of the Project panel in After Effects.)
• Previews now play the composition, layer, or footage only once when the Loop control in the Preview Panel is set to Play Once, even when the playback requires frames to be cached and causes it not to play in real-time. Note that when Cache Before Playback is enabled, the caching phase is separate and not considered to be playback; once all frames are cached, then the single playback loop begins.
• Scrolling in the Render Queue panel during rendering works again.
• Previewing with Full Screen enabled no longer causes an error message: internal verification failure, sorry! {no current context}
• After Effects no longer crashes when you select multiple keyframes, then open the Keyframe Velocity dialog and enable Continuous.
• Executing After Effects via the command line no longer fails if the file path to a project file or script contains “-ep”.

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If you’d like to let us know what you’d like to see addressed in a future update, let us know with a bug report or feature request here. You can also talk with us on the After Effects user-to-user forum. Please, do not leave comments on this blog post, since the blog comment system is not set up well for bug reports or conversations.

The After Effects CC 2015 (13.6.1) bug-fix update is now available. This update fixes multiple bugs, including a bug that caused After Effects to not update the preview image in the Composition panel, which happened most commonly after using Undo.

You can install the update through the Creative Cloud desktop application, or you can check for new updates from within any Adobe application by choosing Help > Updates.

For details of what was added, changed, and fixed in After Effects CC 2015 (13.6), see this page. For details of all of the other updates for Adobe professional video and audio applications, see this page.

Please, if you want to ask questions about this update, come on over to the After Effects user-to-user forum, rather than leaving comments on this blog post. (It’s much harder to have conversations in the comments of a blog post.) If you’d like to submit feature requests or bug reports, you can do so here.

The After Effects team is continuing to investigate other bugs for future updates. Please refer to this article for current information about known issues.

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tell us what we should work on next

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The After Effects team is currently planning our releases for the upcoming year, which will focus on quality and performance. We would like to hear from you about what specific areas we should work on next.

Please fill out a short survey, which will help us learn what you consider most important to the development of After Effects. We appreciate you taking the time to do this.

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bug fixes in After Effects CC 2015 (13.6.1)

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The After Effects CC 2015 (13.6.1) bug-fix update addresses these significant bugs:

• The preview image in the Composition panel no longer fails to update in certain cases after you make a change to the composition. This fix prevents After Effects from putting the image cache into a bad state, which most commonly occurred on Windows after using Undo, but could also occur after other changes once the project had entered the bad state.
• Previewing a composition with audio will no longer fail to start when a layer has an audio effect with an expression, and display an error: Effect cannot use “abort” callback when called with “unrecognized plug-in effect command” command. ( 25 :: 19 )
• Viewer panels (Composition, Layer, Footage) no longer show downsampling artifacts when the viewer zoom is set to 50% zoom, the viewer resolution is set to Full, and the Hardware Accelerate Composition, Layer, and Footage Panels option is enabled in Preferences > Display.
• After Effects no longer fails to start on computers with older processors lacking a specific instruction set (e.g., AMD Phenom II and Athlon processors). The error message given for this specific issue was “The application was unable to start correctly (0xc000001d)” or “The application was unable to start correctly (0xc0000142)”. Note: A similar issue affects Premiere Pro CC 2015 (9.1), for which the fix is somewhat more involved. An upcoming Premiere Pro update is intended to address this issue. Thank you for your patience.
• After Effects no longer generates the wrong image for layers using some plug-ins in 16-bpc or 32-bpc (bits per channel) color mode. Affected plug-ins included Digital Film Tools Film Stocks and Digital Anarchy plug-ins.
• Creative Cloud account names that use non-ASCII characters (e.g., Japanese and Chinese characters) no longer cause an error “could not convert Unicode characters” when you start After Effects.