New After Effects Format Support and Memory Improvements

New format support and memory improvements for VR workflows. Plus a few fixes along the way.

The latest update to Adobe After Effects CC includes more than fifty bug fixes, as well as new format support and memory improvements for VR workflows. It is a recommended update for all users.

New Format Support

This update includes support for three new formats across After Effects, Premiere Pro, and Adobe Media Encoder:

Variable frame rate video with audio sync

Footage recorded with a variable frame rate, such as from screen capture software or video shot on mobile phones, now maintains audio sync when played back or exported.

ARRI ALEXA Mini MXF/ARRIRAW

Footage captured by the ARRI ALEXA Mini camera in MXF/ARRIRAW format (ARRIRAW codec in an MXF container file) can now be imported.

HEVC (H.265) QuickTime

HEVC (also known as H.265) codec footage in a QuickTime (.MOV) container, such as produced by an iPhone or iPad with iOS 11 or a DJI Phantom 4 drone, can now be imported into After Effects, Premiere Pro, and Adobe Media Encoder.

VR Improvements

Work with higher-resolution VR footage with lower GPU memory requirements through more efficient cubemap layout. The Create VR Environment and Extract Cubemap tools now generate the intermediate cubemap in 3:2 format instead of 4:3 format, enabling 6K VR (monoscopic) workflows at medium quality on GPUs with only 4GB of memory.

Key Bug Fixes

• After Effects no longer crashes when you copy shape layer data from mocha AE CC or mocha Pro.
• Parameter values no longer overlap in the Timeline panel on Windows when display scaling is set to 150 percent.
• Context menus now work in undocked panels on a secondary monitor on mac OS 10.13 (High Sierra).
• Keyboard shortcuts assigned to commands generated by plug-ins now work on Windows.
• The recent fonts list at the top of the font menu in the Character panel is no longer missing.
• The sourceData and sourceText expression attributes now correctly decode Unicode characters in JSON files.
• Expression-heavy compositions no longer render more slowly than After Effects 14.2.1.
• DNxHD and DNxHR codec QuickTime files exported with alpha no longer have a dark halo in the alpha channel.
• QuickTime or AVI files exported via the render queue will no longer be missing the last frame if you have selected a codec that is not native to After Effects and the project is set to Mercury GPU Acceleration.
• XML project files (.aepx) saved in a previous version of After Effects no longer open with all effect names removed and all masks renamed to “Mask”.
• If the Media Cache location is set to the root directory of a drive, Premiere Pro 12.0.1 no longer fails to load a Motion Graphics template created by After Effects or shows a warning that After Effects needs to be installed.