Today, the After Effects CS6 (11.0.2) update was released.

If Adobe Application Manager hasn’t already told you about this, go ahead and check for new updates by choosing Help > Updates. The best way to check for updates is by closing all Adobe applications other than Adobe Bridge, and choosing Help > Updates in Adobe Bridge; this ensures that all processes related to Adobe video applications have been quit and can be updated safely.

Ideally, you should install the updates automatically by choosing Help > Updates, but you can also directly download the update packages from the download page for Windows or Mac OS by choosing the “Adobe After Effects CS6 11.0.2″ update for your operating system. Unfortunately and confusingly, these links are not at the top of the list of updates, so you’ll have to scroll down the respective page of updates to find each of them.

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[UPDATE: The CinemaDNG Technology Center page has been updated with the CinemaDNG specification, example files, and other materials for those interested in working with this format.]

A recent post on the Adobe Labs blog seems to have confused many people with this sentence:

“The Cinema DNG Initiative has been discontinued and is no longer hosted on Adobe Labs.”

What this is intending to communicate is simply that the experimental plug-in for CinemaDNG for Premiere Pro CS5.5 was removed from the Adobe Labs website. The CinemaDNG format continues to be an open format, and its development is not limited to Adobe. We moved the specification and other materials from the Adobe Labs area of the Adobe website to the Adobe Developer Center area of the Adobe website.

CinemaDNG files can still be opened by any current Adobe application that includes the Camera Raw plug-in for importing DNG files. This includes After Effects and Photoshop. Also, we just issued a bug-fix update for SpeedGrade that makes it work better with CinemaDNG files.

[UPDATE: The Adobe Labs team has corrected their blog post to make the above more clear.]

Here’s a post by Philip Bloom showing how to use some CinemaDNG test footage from the BlackMagic Cinema camera in Photoshop. Here’s a screenshot of me using the same footage in After Effects CS6:

One question that we’ve been seeing a lot–especially since the recent announcements of a couple of cameras–is why Premiere Pro doesn’t import CinemaDNG files. The answer is simply that we have not been satisfied with the performance that we have been able to achieve with CinemaDNG files in Premiere Pro, in which real-time playback is crucial. If it’s important to you that we add native import of CinemaDNG footage into Premiere Pro, please let us know with a feature request so that we can get a sense of whether this is an area where we need to put more effort. We really do value those feature requests.

In the meantime, of course, you can use After Effects to transcode your CinemaDNG footage to something that you can edit with in Premiere Pro.

For information about the CinemaDNG specification and how this format is being developed, see the resources linked to from the CinemaDNG Technology Center page and the CinemaDNG page on Wikipedia.

Do you use Chinese, Arabic, Hindi, or Hebrew heavily in your After Effects work?

The After Effects team is interested in enlisting some help testing with these languages.

If you are interested in helping with this testing process, let us know by sending email to aftereffects (at) adobe (dot) com.

Please include the following details:

• your full name, email address, and country of residence
• which languages you use extensively in your After Effects work
• what kind(s) of work you do with After Effects (Feel free to include a link to samples.)
• what company you work for, and what kind of company this is (For freelancers, describe your typical clients.)
• what version(s) of After Effects you are using
• what operating system(s) you use for After Effects

Even if you aren’t willing to help with testing, please tell us about what difficulties you have when using these languages (or any others) with After Effects, as well as what workarounds and/or utilities you use to get past these difficulties.

Do not leave comments on this blog post to give feedback; send the feedback directly to the email address above or submit it through the feature-request/bug-report form.

The fine folks at video2brain have just posted some sample videos from the 10+ hours of video training in After Effects CS6: Learn By Video, which I recorded with my partner Angie Taylor. Angie and I also worked together on the previous version, After Effects CS5 Learn By Video, and I was delighted to be able to work with her again.

This DVD and book provide an introduction to After Effects that is designed to bring you from the beginner level to the intermediate level, as well as to warn and educate you about all of the common pitfalls and gotchas in After Effects.

Here are some free videos to give you an idea of what is included in this extensive video training series:

Preview panel (playing video and audio) color keying (garbage mattes, hold-out mattes) 3D Camera Tracker (and 3D text) Brainstorm (experimenting with effect properties) compound effects (including the Camera Lens Blur effect) slowing motion, freezing a frame, and reversing time bending 2D layers in 3D space extruding text and shapes in 3D material options and environment layers in 3D RAM and disk caches exporting with Adobe Media Encoder from After Effects preparing Cinema 4D projects for After Effects compositing multipass renders from Cinema 4D in After Effects

You can also check out free sample video tutorials from After Effects CS5 Learn By Video, nearly all of which are also relevant for After Effects CS5.5 and CS6.

Also, my entire two-hour series about what’s new and changed in After Effects CS6 is free on the video2brain website.

After Effects CS6 includes a significant change from After Effects CS5.5 regarding the ability to use network rendering without activation of render-only instances of the application, known as render engines.

After Effects CS5.5 had to be activated (serial number entered) on render-only machines due to licensing restrictions for certain codecs. See this post by After Effects product manager Steve Forde for more background about this.

In After Effects CS6, you can now run aerender or use the watch folder functionality in a non-royalty-bearing mode, without activating the render-only instances of the application.

In this non-royalty-bearing mode, the following codec-specific features are disabled:

• decoding and encoding (import and export) of MPEG-2 video, including formats that are based on MPEG-2 video: XDCAM EX, XDCAM HD and other formats in MXF OP1a containers, and HDV
• decoding of AC3 / Dolby Digital audio, which is used in AVCHD media

All other formats that After Effects can import and export are enabled in non-royalty-bearing mode.

To enable non-royalty-bearing mode:

1. Install After Effects on the render-only machine.
2. Place a blank file named ae_render_only_node.txt into one of the following locations, depending on the user account type:

   • Mac OS:

     /Users/[username]/Documents/

     /Users/Shared/Adobe/

   • Windows:

     C:Users[username]Documents

     C:UsersPublicDocumentsAdobe

If you want to enable these royalty-bearing codecs, you need to activate After Effects on each rendering computer, meaning that you need to enter a serial number after installation. If you need to do this on a large number of computers, you probably want to consider a volume license.

For more about what’s new and changed in After Effects CS6, see this page.

Here’s the updated After Effects CS6 scripting guide.

Jeff Almasol did the vast majority of the work to update this document. Thanks, Jeff!

(To those of you who have been waiting for an overly long time for this: Heap your scorn on me, since I took too long to hand this over to Jeff when I realized that I wasn’t able to get to it.)

We’ll get this document up on the After Effects Developer Center soon.

This is just a summary. See the After Effects CS6 scripting guide for details and examples.

• Added Viewer object. It represents a Composition, Layer, or Footage panel (viewer).
• The canSetExpression attribute for the Property object now returns true for arbitrary data properties (like the Level effect’s Histogram property or the Curves effect’s Curves property) that could already accept expressions.
• Added activeViewer attribute to the Application object. It gets the Viewer object for the currently focused or last-focused viewer. Returns null if no viewers are open.
• Added environmentLayer attribute to the AVLayer object. It represents the environment layer status for a layer based on video footage or still image in a ray-traced 3D composition. You can set and get this Boolean value. Setting it to true automatically makes the layer 3D (threeDLayer becomes true).
• Added openInViewer method to AVLayer object. It opens the AV layer in a Layer viewer, and moves the viewer to front and gives it focus. This method takes no parameters and returns a Viewer object, or null if it failed to open the viewer for some reason (e.g., for text or shape layers, which cannot open in the Layer viewer).
• Added openInViewer method to the CompItem object. It opens the composition in a Composition viewer and moves the viewer to front and gives it focus. This method takes no paramters and returns a Viewer object, or null if it failed to open the viewer for some reason.
• Added openInViewer method to the FootageItem object. It opens the footage item in a Footage viewer and moves the viewer to front and gives it focus. Note that missing and placeholder footage can be opened using this method, but cannot manually (i.e., double-clicking missing or placeholder footage asks the user to select a replacement footage file). This method takes no parameters and returns a Viewer object, or null if it failed to open the viewer for some reason.

• Added maskFeatherFalloff attribute to the MaskPropertyGroup object. It represents the Layer > Mask > Feather Falloff setting. You can set and get this enumerated value:

  MaskFeatherFalloff.FFO_LINEAR
MaskFeatherFalloff.FFO_SMOOTH


• Added featherSegLocs attribute to the Shape object. It represents the mask path segments (sections of a mask path between vertices). You can set and get this array of segment numbers, 0-based.

• Added featherRelSegLocs attribute to the Shape object. It represents the relative position of a feather point (0 to 1) on a mask path segment. You can set and get this array of values.
• Added featherRadii attribute to the Shape object. It represents the feather amount; inner feather points are negative values. You can set and get this array of values.
• Added featherInterps attribute to the Shape object. It represents the feather radius interpolation type for a feather point (0 for non-Hold, 1 for Hold). You can set and get this array of values. Note: Values are stored in the array in the order that feather points were created.
• Added featherTensions attribute to the Shape property. It represents the feather point tension amount (0 to 1). You can set and get this array of values.
• Added featherTypes attribute to the Shape property. It represents the feather point direction (0 for outer feather point, 1 for inner feather point). You can set and get this array of values. You cannot change the direction of a feather point after it has been created.
• Added featherRelCornerAngles attribute to the Shape property. It represents the relative angle between the two normals on either side of a curved outer feather boundary at a corner on a mask path. Values are 0 for feather points not at corners. You can set and get this array of values.

• dropdownlist controls can now extend beyond the window bounds.

• multiline edittext controls now allow the Enter/Return key to insert a new line. Previously, it was unclear how to add a new line in a multiline edittext control. Now, with a new wantReturn property set to true, this control can get the new behavior. Existing behavior is unchanged.

  myTextBox: EditText { text:'Enter & Return welcome here', properties:{ multiline:true, wantReturn:true }, preferredSize:[-1,80] },


  Note: The onChange callback will be called when the control loses focus (e.g., when you click outside of the edittext control).

• Columns in multicolumn listbox controls can now be hidden or shown using the new visible array for the listbox’s columns attribute. Ex.

  myListBox.columns.visible[1] = false; // hide the 2nd column


• Appearance brightness setting now affects nonembedded window (palette, dialog, window) types, in addition to the existing support for embedded panels, for a more integrated look. Similar support is now available for the focus ring around controls in both embedded and nonembedded windows.
• The appearance of controls should more closely match those in the main application. There will still be some differences, but they should be fewer than in previous versions.
• Version 6 of ScriptUI has some minor updated visuals for buttons and scrollbars.

Today, the After Effects CS6 (11.0.1) update was released.

If Adobe Application Manager hasn’t already told you about this, go ahead and check for new updates by choosing Help > Updates. The best way to check for updates is by closing all Adobe applications other than Adobe Bridge, and choosing Help > Updates in Adobe Bridge; this ensures that all processes related to Adobe video applications have been quit and can be updated safely.

Ideally, you should install the updates automatically by choosing Help > Updates, but you can also directly download the update packages from the download page for Windows or Mac OS by choosing the “Adobe After Effects CS6 11.0.1″ update for your operating system. (Note: The update is not listed near the top of the page, where I expected it.)

For information about updates for other Adobe professional video applications, see this page.

If you have difficulty with this update, please bring questions and issues to the After Effects forum. Don’t ask questions in the comments on this blog post, which fewer people will see.

We have also been working with several providers of plug-ins, codecs, and hardware devices to assist them in updating their software to fix some errors and crashes. Please take this opportunity to download and install updated codecs, plug-ins, and drivers from these providers, as relevant to your work. For more information about plug-ins for After Effects CS6, see this page.

• The Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 (a new Kepler-class GPU) can now be used for GPU acceleration of the ray-traced 3D renderer on Windows.

  See this page for details of GPU features in After Effects CS6.

  Note: An additional delay (approximately one minute) will occur the first time that you start After Effects with a Kepler-class GPU as the new ray-traced 3D library is initialized. Installation of updated display drivers may require this initialization step again.

• Enabled basic support for the AtomKraft composition renderer (requires plug-ins from Jupiter Jazz).

• Several bugs with the global performance cache were fixed, which were causing the cache to not be invalidated at some times when it should have been. This meant that sometimes old, invalid image information was being read from the cache and used instead of re-rendering when an aspect of the composition had changed.

  If you encounter a remaining bug of this sort, purging the cache will generally fix the problem (choosing Edit > Purge > All Image Memory to clear RAM cache and Empty Disk Cache in Media & Disk Cache preferences to clear disk cache). If you encounter such a bug after installing this update, let us know by submitting a detailed bug report, being especially certain to list any third-party effects used.

  One remaining known issue of this sort relates to font substitution: If you load a project with a missing font, After Effects will substitute a placeholder font. If you then install the missing font, After Effects may not update cached image information with the new font. So, if you install a font after loading a project for which that font was reported as missing, purge the cache to force the cached image information to be updated with the new font.

• Effects that use the composition camera (e.g., Shatter) did not render correctly in orthogonal and custom views, or when changing the active camera.
• After Effects would crash when evaluating some expressions, including expressions added by the Ease & Wizz script, expressions using the this keyword, in-line functions, and nested functions.
• After Effects was returning an error “After Effects Error: Ray Traced 3D: … (5070::0)” under various circumstances. Several of these have been isolated and fixed. If you get such an error message after installing this update, let us know by submitting a detailed bug report.
• Crash on quit if Nvidia cards running in Maximus configuration are running in TCC mode (on Windows).
• Crash using 3D Camera Tracker effect.
• Crash resetting Puppet effect.
• Unexpected results using Mask Feather tool in various circumstances.
• Black frames appeared in MXF footage from Canon EOS C300 camera.
• Canon 5D MKIII 720p footage was imported with the wrong timecode.
• Error occurred when setting a proxy to a nested composition: “After Effects error: Internal verification failure, sorry! {Src and dest bitdepths are different in PF_World::CopyRect} (37::109)”
• Snapping and using the J and K keys to move to keyframes and other items in the Graph Editor didn’t work.
• Using the Clone Stamp tool expanded property groups in the Timeline panel.
• SDK: The AUTOMATIC_WIDE_TIME flag was not working correctly with the NON_PARAM_VARY flag.
• SDK: The AUTOMATIC_WIDE_TIME flag was returning an empty region when attempting to check out a layer at the current time.

I’ve gotten a few questions about FreeForm, which is an effect that was bundled with After Effects CS5 and After Effects CS5.5 to distort 2D layers in 3D space.

No, FreeForm is not included in After Effects CS6.

Yes, you can still use FreeForm in After Effects CS6, though not the version that was bundled with After Effects CS5 and CS5.5; Mettle needed to make some changes to the plug-in for After Effects CS6. In After Effects CS6, you can use the new (and faster) version of FreeForm or an even more feature-rich version, FreeForm Pro, both of which you can get from the Mettle website.

As After Effects adds more native 3D features, our plug-in partners like Zaxwerks, Mettle, and Trapcode will continue to provide additional features through their products, allowing you to go beyond what is possible with the standard After Effects package. Zax Dow of Zaxwerks makes that point very well in this interview on Motionworks.

For more about plug-ins for After Effects CS6, see this page.

John Dickinson has created a free After Effects CS6 project that includes several 3D materials, such as glass, steel, chrome, copper, and plastic. This project demonstrates how to work with the material options and other features in After Effects CS6 to create various looks using the new ray-traced 3D renderer.

You can download the project here. Be sure to watch John’s great tutorials on this subject: introduction to new 3D features in After Effects CS6 tutorial specifically about this materials project For more about what’s new and changed in After Effects CS6, as well as how to order it or try it free for 30 days, see this page.

One thing to keep in mind when working with the ray-traced 3D renderer is that its performance is greatly enhanced by the GPU. See this page for details about how After Effects CS6 uses CUDA and OpenGL on the GPU.

For more information on the new 3D features in After Effects CS6, see these free video tutorial from Total Training and video2brain:

Total Training, with Brian Maffitt

• introduction to Classic 3D renderer
• introduction to extruded text and shapes
• more about extruded text and shapes
• bending 2D layers in 3D
• 3D environment maps
• new 3D material options

video2brain, with me (Todd Kopriva)

• introduction to extruded text and shapes
• bending 2D layers in 3D
• introduction to the new ray-traced 3D renderer
• new 3D material options
• 3D environment layers
• using Fast Previews to work in 3D
• using the new layer bounding boxes and selection indicators in 3D

Here is a free downloadable package of After Effects template projects that you can use in After Effects CS3 and later.

These are the same template projects that were included on a separate “Contents” or “Extras” disc in the box with previous versions of After Effects, or could be downloaded in a separate “Functional Content” package (that was rather hard to find on our website). We’ve made them easier to find and download for all After Effects users on the After Effects Exchange. This .zip file includes several template projects and associated footage, which you can use as a starting point for your own project or to study to learn how to recreate the animations in these templates.

Download and unzip the file and put the Templates and Footage folders anywhere on your computer. Previous versions of After Effects would install these files in the Support Files folder, and that’s as good a place as any for you to install them.

For more information about template projects, see this video by Andrew Devis and this page in After Effects Help. Note that Andrew’s video presumes that you have already installed the template projects in the Support Files folder.