After Effects CC (April 2017) In-Depth: Bug Fixes and Miscellaneous Changes

A couple of weeks we released version 14.2 of After Effects CC, which added many often-requested features as well as an exciting new workflow for sharing motion graphics.

In this article, we’re sharing more detail about about bug fixes in this release, as well as a few smaller changes to how After Effects works.

Please, if you want to ask questions about these new and changed features, come on over to the After Effects Forums. 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 at this page.

Miscellaneous Changes

• The Composition Settings dialog window is now slightly wider, which prevents truncation of text in the 3D Renderer tab in non-English languages.
• Marker in and out icons have changed (the icons used when a marker has duration).
• The Essentials workspace has been renamed to Default, to avoid confusion with the new Essential Graphics workspace.
• Due to the changes to workspaces in this release, custom workspaces are not migrated from previous versions of After Effects.
• Installing After Effects no longer also installs a set of fonts. The same fonts installed with previous versions of After Effects, such as Adobe Myriad Pro, remain available as part of your Creative Cloud subscription through Adobe Typekit. Please read the Creative Cloud Fonts FAQ for more information.

Notable bug fixes

• The started time and render time of completed render items in the Render Queue panel are no longer reset when you start the queue.
• Render Settings templates saved from earlier versions of After Effects can again be loaded instead of returning an error: could not convert Unicode characters. ( 23 :: 46 ).
• Audio is no longer silent for the first 2 seconds of real-time playback of previews after the composition has been fully cached, if both the Hardware Accelerate Composition, Layer, and Footage Panels preference and the Mute Audio When Preview Is Not Real-time preference are enabled.
• Camera raw and DNG files with read-only permissions can be imported again instead of returning an error: File could’t be opened for writing: ““. ( 3 :: 0 ).
• The Replace Footage dialog no longer disables Photoshop, Illustrator, DNG, or camera raw files on macOS if you have installed the Maxon C4DImporter plug-in (for the .aec file workflow).
• Multiple missing JPEG files are again re-linked simultaneously when you choose Replace Footage for a missing file, if all missing JPEG files can be found in relative paths.
• Applying animation presets from Bridge works as expected on macOS and no longer results in an error message: Can’t import file “preset name.ffx”: unsupported type or extension. ( 0 :: 1 ). IMPORTANT: This bug is not fixed on macOS when using the File > Open With menu in Bridge (to work around this, double-click or use File > Open instead), and is not solved on Windows for any method of applying a preset from Bridge (use the Effects & Preset panel in After Effects instead). We will continue to investigate the remaining problems for a future update.
• A text scale animator set to 0% in a composition that uses the CINEMA 4D renderer no longer causes an error: cannot normalize zero vector ( 17 :: 50 ).
• Changes to a Character Animator scene or Premiere Pro sequence, such as muting the audio, that is dynamically linked into an After Effects composition are now properly recognized when you switch applications back to After Effects.
• Layers using effects that composite the layer source with the previous effects on the layer, such as CC Composite, Calculations, Set Matte, or similar. no longer sometimes randomly render in the upper-left corner of the composition when the disk cache is enabled.
• After Effects no longer sometimes plays audio at the wrong sample rate through some channels of an external audio device (ex., MOTU 24ao or similar device).
• After Effects no longer resets the Audio Output Mapping preferences to channels 1 and 2 after you select other channels on a multi-channel audio device.
• After Effects updates the Composition panel immediately, instead of waiting for a redraw request, when you enable or disable the Hardware Accelerate Composition, Layer, and Footage Panels preference.
• Collect Files no long sometimes fails or gives an error message on macOS if you move the mouse pointer while files are being copied.
• Collect Files again lists the effects used in the project in the project report file.
• Post-render actions in the render queue are again evaluated after each render item is completed, instead of when the entire queue completes.
• Render log files are no longer written when only a single render item is processed by the render queue and the render item is set to Log Errors only. This restores the render log behavior of After Effects 13.2 and previous releases.
• File association of After Effects projects, to this version of After Effects, no longer breaks on Windows if you uninstall a 2015 release of After Effects after installing this version.
• The Project Settings dialog now opens to the Color Settings tab when you choose Set Project Working Space from the Channel and Color Management Settings menu in the Composition, Layer, and Footage panels.
• Drop-down menus in ScriptUI panels are no longer clipped on HiDPI displays on Windows.
• The appearance of buttons, sliders, disclosure triangles (“twirly arrow”), scroll bar, progress bar, radio buttons, and checkboxes in ScriptUI embedded panels have been updated to match the appearance of After Effects native controls.
• After Effects no longer crashes on launch if one of the workspace files is corrupted.
• After Effects no longer crashes when the compPointToSource() scripting method is used with a 3D text layer.
• After Effects no longer crashes when running a script that uses the FlashPlayer object.
• If After Effects crashes during startup, some error dialogs will no longer appear to be blank or display dark gray text on an even darker gray background. Also fixed several causes of crashes when After Effects starts or quits that displayed such dialogs, such as this error: globals unborn ( 21 :: 1 ).