Adobe has recently released a very nice update to After Effects for their Creative Cloud subscribers. Todd Kopriva of Adobe has provided an exhaustive list of what’s new and changed in his blog. We’ve updated my After Effects: Creative Cloud Updates course on lynda.com to demonstrate our favorites among the new features, including:

• The Rigid Mask Tracker, which can take an initial mask shape you’ve drawn, and adjusts it from frame to frame as the enclosed object moves around the screen. There are some limitations – such as the object must be “rigid” (think windows instead of moving lips) – but it works surprisingly well. The temptation will be to use it for windows, signs, license plates, and similar objects, but in fact we’ve found it useful for tracking irregularly shaped objects for the purposes of color correction and other effects – for example, to knock down the glare or reflections in a pair of glasses an actor or presenter may be wearing. The movie demonstrating it is free for all; not just lynda.com subscribers:

• A new as well as an improved way to scale up footage beyond 100% more cleanly. The first is the brand-new Detail-preserving Upscale effect, which introduces a new scaling algorithm beyond bilinear and bicubic, and includes slider adjustments for edge enhancement and noise reduction. The other is the addition of bicubic scaling as an option for the versatile but underused Transform effect.
• A new Property Linking function that automatically writes expressions for you that links one or more properties from one layer to another, using a modified copy & paste procedure. You can select targeted parameters, or even an entire effect or set of transformations, and use Edit > Copy with Property Links. Then select your target layer and paste as normal. These links even work across different compositions inside the same project.

We also covered a number of other smaller but still very useful enhancements and changes (such as the audio waveforms now being drawn “rectified” by default, to better match Adobe Premiere Pro). While we were at it, we also updated the captions for several movies in the After Effects Apprentice courses affected by this release, as well as Chris' Editing and Animating to Sound with Adobe After Effects course that was released a few months ago.

As Adobe makes further significant changes to After Effects, we’ll continue to update our After Effects: Creative Cloud Updates course. If you don't already have a lynda.com subscription, click this link to get your first seven days free before you have to commit to a new subscription. And even if you don't, a few movies in this course – including an introduction to importing CINEMA 4D projects into After Effects CC as layers, as well as an introduction to the new Refine Edge tool – are free to all visitors by following the course link above. Enjoy!