After Effects 2023 - New Features and Updates

New Composition Presets

An amazing feature that Adobe added is new composition presets. To see how it works, we’ll create a new comp:

We can see that we got new, modern up-to-date presets: Hd, Ultra-Hd, Social Media presets and many other useful presets you might need. It will definitely save us a lot of time, since we don’t have to set everything from scratch!

Separate Dimensions by Default

Next feature is the ability to separate dimensions of position by default. Our X and Y position dimensions are controlled by one keyframe. Before, we could separate them by right-clicking on Position and choosing Separate Dimensions:

Now, we can do this by default! Go to Preferences>General>Default Position Properties to Separated Dimensions:

Now, if you create a new object you’ll see that X and Y dimensions are separated by default!

Native H.264 Rendering

After Effects finally brought back a feature from previous versions, that was loved by many users - now you can once again render H.264 without a media encoder!

In our render menu, we can see that we have the ability to render H.264 with 5 Mbps or 40 Mbps presets:

 This is probably the best feature of the new update because now we won’t need encoders, at least for our H.264 renders.

New Track Mattes

Another noticeable feature that will make our work convenient is the new Adobe Track Mattes. If you’re not familiar with Track Mattes, it’s the ability of one layer to take Alpha from another.

For example, we take the texture and want the texture to get the Alpha from this text:

In the previous version, we had to place the texture layer under the text layer and link it:

If we moved our layer in the previous version, the connection was lost, but now the layers stay connected:

Even better than that, we can connect our text with several textures at once! This is how it looks:

To do so, we should select our textures and link them to the text layer:

Looks splendid! This is what new Track Mattes can do in After Effects.

Also, you can find any texture or other media in seconds straight in After Effects! Use EasyEdit Viewer+Assets to quickly browse, preview & import any photo, video or GIF into your project:

Keyframe Labels

Adobe also improved Keyframe Labels a lot. Now our keyframes look different - if we select our keyframes, we can label them:

Also, you can select all keyframes with the same label by selecting just one of them. Select one of your keyframes, right-click on it and go to the Select Keyframe Label Group>On Selected Layers:

You can also choose a different selection, for example, select keyframes on All Layers, or only on Visible Layers. Great and convenient feature, that will definitely be useful for editors!

Conclusion 

This amazing update is actually follows After Effects’ editors interest - all features were very much needed and we’re happy to finally use them! Also, Adobe is testing 3D models in AE beta version, we believe soon we’ll got a lot to talk about.