Adobe & Animation: Strategy for 2019 and Beyond

New updates to After Effects CC, Character Animator CC, and Animate CC bring tighter integration between industry-leading animation and design tools for maximum efficiency and creative flexibility.

For 25 years, Adobe has been the animator’s best partner, and now we’re striving to put our users at the center of the most powerful and complete animation system in the world by aligning our product development, ensuring our products work well with each other, and thinking about animation across Creative Cloud.

After a year spent working side by side with video animators across the industry, we’re investing in the future of the industry and beginning to deliver on the first of their requests as we build a solid foundation for the future.

Commitment to innovation

Along with powerful Adobe Sensei-driven innovations like the Characterizer feature launching at MAX in Adobe Character Animator CC, a feature that will open up performance-based animation to more people, we are also delivering on the first phases of interoperability for our users across our video animation tools and beyond.

Streamlined workflows

We currently support conventional frame-by-frame animation workflows in Photoshop and Animate CC, keyframe workflows in Animate and After Effects, and now even performance-based and live animation workflows in Character Animator CC. But we know animators are increasingly responsible for more than a single deliverable — and need our tools to work well together to deliver a project in more places like marketing and promotion, social media, and live events. In that spirit, we are pleased to offer some new instances of cross-app workflows.

You can now open an Animate CC project in After Effects, with the layers and audio organized and in sync, allowing users of Animate CC to apply After Effects’ powerful tools and effects to their existing Animate projects and those to come.

Similarly, users of XD’s powerful design platform can now bring their XD elements into After Effects as well, applying animation to those designs for incorporation in everything from product and prototype walkthroughs to animated UI.

Character Animator, which already integrates with Photoshop, Illustrator, and Dynamic Link with After Effects and Premiere Pro, now imports EPS and SVG graphics for more ways to work with existing assets and IP. Character Animator’s Sensei-powered Automatic Lip Sync is now available in Animate CC as well.

With the addition of depth passes and more advanced puppet pins, to all the wonderful things it can accomplish with motion graphics, After Effects is extending its presence as the hub for things in motion that are destined for the screen.

Commitment to animators

As we work to bring these tools into alignment around video animation for studios, agencies, and individual animators in video, new workflows and content destinations are cropping up daily, so Adobe is working to support animation across our many apps in our ecosystem.

So if you’re working in hand-drawn frames in Photoshop’s timeline or with Animate’s newly improved brushes, Character Animator’s live and performance-based abilities, or After Effects’ unrivaled key frames, we intend to make work easier, faster, smarter, and more complete for more animators that rely on our tools in the production of exquisite work.

We’re helping video animators explore our offerings through a new Video Animation page to get started in the direction that makes sense for their work, and to keep them growing as Adobe & Animation moves toward the next 25 years.

Try Creative Cloud

Adobe animation tools give you everything you need to bring your stories to life on film, TV, and the web. Access all Adobe animation tools, as well as Photoshop, Illustrator, and many other creative tools with your Creative Cloud subscription. Download the latest versions or free trials today.