With 3 actual updates to After Effects in 2013, it's become difficult for many users to keep track of all the new features. So reading through top After Effects feature requests of 2013, plus a peek at what we’re thinking about for the near future, today's post by Todd Kopriva, is a good way to do a reality check of what's happened this year.

On December 14, Tim Kurkoski of Adobe also noted 5 new and changed features in After Effects CC (12.2) that resulted from visiting users in Vancouver, BC.

It seems that there's been hundreds of changes and fixes, and even the trainers aren't keeping up. And this is just one app in Creative Cloud — Premiere Pro CC has had 4 releases this year! CS6 versions also got multiple bug fix releases. (For details see the October 2013 feature roundup.)

In the last seveal months, there were 3 videos on the updates: After Effects Creative Cloud Updates by Chris and Trish Meyer (November; part of rolling updates), After Effects CC 12.1 update review (December) by Mikey Borup, and Hidden Gems in After Effects CC (September) by John Dickinson. Earlier ones were listed in CS Next Sneak Peeks (April-June) and include strong training from Mamoworld and reTooled.net.

Eran Stern added some video covering new features, After Effects 12.2 innovations cloud version – updates October December, though they are Hebrew-only. Happily, Chris and Trish Meyer came through in English with After Effects CC version 12.2: Our favorite features in the December Creative Cloud update, here on PVC.

Demo video for the most recent update is available, mostly on Adobe TV. For example, here's Use Property Linking to control effects in multiple clips by Maxim Jago and Rigid Mask Tracker by Andrew Trice.

Anyway, here are the top new features for After Effects CC, which had releases in June, October, and December. Somewhere in there was a stable version for Mac OS X v10.9 (Mavericks). You'll have to dig through Todd's 3 release tomes (linked below) to find the numerous other fixes and feature additions:

After Effects CC (12.0)

• CINEMA 4D Lite and live 3D pipeline between CINEMA 4D and After Effects
• Refine Edge tool, Roto Brush & Refine Edge effect, and Refine Soft Matte effect
• Warp Stabilizer VFX, improvements to the Warp Stabilizer effect
• improvements to the 3D Camera Tracker effect
• ability to find instances of missing fonts, effects, and footage
• snapping to layer features, including anchor points and masks
• bicubic resampling
• Pixel Motion Blur effect
• Sync Settings for sharing keyboard shortcuts, preferences, and other settings

After Effects CC (12.1)

• mask tracker
• Detail-preserving Upscale effect
• improved performance for analysis phase for 3D Camera Tracker and Warp Stabilizer effects
• property linking
• HiDPI content viewers for Retina displays on Mac computers
• improved snapping behavior, including snapping beyond layer boundaries and to internal wireframes
• OptiX 3.0 library for GPU-accelerated ray-traced 3D renderer
• improved Cinema 4D integration
• Adobe Anywhere integration and an early preview of the Media Browser panel

After Effects CC (12.2)

• Auto-save enabled by default
• file name and location templates, plus automatic creation of folders for image sequences
• settings migration
• snapping improvements: shape layers, cameras, and lights
• option for creating shape layers based on Bezier paths
• command for converting a parametric shape layer path to a Bezier path
• new version of OptiX library and new behavior of OptiX library loading and initialization
• plus many miscellaneous new and changed features and bug fixes