By now you all probably know that Adobe just announced the Creative Suite Production Premium CS6. It’s been 2 years since the last major release of AE (CS5) and only a year since the last upgrade (CS5.5).

This new cycle scheme allows the plabt (the connoisseur name of the AE dev team) to build bigger, stronger features between 2 major releases, while also staying up-to-date with fancy stuff for the .5 one.

CS5 was a major step forward mainly thanks to the 64bit jump. Sadly, while being huge and important, this “feature” was almost overseen because it needed a 64b OS, which was not a standard by that time, and because users didn’t know how to really take advantage of it. Worst, it broke all your 3rd party plugin.

After Effects CS6 also have a major new “invisible” feature that might not be as sexy as 3D shiny stuff, but that will make you work faster and wish to never come back to an older version: the Global Performance Cache.

Global Performance Cache

Behind this unsexy name is hidden the biggest overhaul in the recent AE history: the caching system. To put it simple: it rocks. Why ? Because now, the cached frames are persistant, even between sessions. Just imagine, it’s the end of the day, you ram preview your heavy comp, and then close AE. The next morning, you boot-up your computer, launch AE, and BOOM: AE loads all your previously cached frames and your RAM preview is still here, ready to play.

Better: You do a ram preview of your comp, then tweak some settings and redo a ram preview. You don’t like the settings so you undo and go back to the previous ones. You know what: your former ram preview is reloaded, no need to recalculate them.

Even better: Your precomps can be cached in the background while you work, and modifying layers on top of them won’t need a rerender of their content. Plus, if your using the same precomps in different projects, once cached, the frames will be available for all of them !

Even even better: If you have visually identical frames repeted in your project (like in loops for exemple), once AE cached one, it will fill all the others.

This is the most time saving, workflow enhancing feature you’ve seen in AE since… since a very long time. It will litterally kill your coffee breaks. It’s a first step toward real time in AE. Now testing and tweaking settings in AE have never been so rewarding.

The other (fancy) new features

On top of this brilliant caching, AE CS6 has a lot of new features as well:

A 3D Camera Tracker: based on the same technology as the WarpStabilizer introduced in CS5.5, AE now have a 3D camera tracker built-in, and the best thing about it: it doesn’t suck.

Variable Mask Feathering. Yes, after so long you lost faith in seeing it coming to your favorite compositing app, but they did it, for real.

Rolling Shutter Repair: Like the 3D Camera Tracker, this effect is built on the same tech as the WarpStabilizer introduced in CS5.5. Fast and Efficient.

Ray traced Texts and Shapes. Yes, 3D is coming in After Effects. No, you won’t be able to import meshes or objects from 3D software (not even from Photoshop). But even if it’s limited to Texts and Shape layers, the raytracing engine, optimized for GPU, is very powerfull and is a solid starting point for more to come (at least I hope more will come). And even if it sounds limited, it comes with another new nifty feature: you can now convert Illustrator layers into shape layers… Oh yes, repeaters, animators, etc etc… You’re gonna love it. The ray tracing engine also allows you to have environment map layers, and to bend/distort our usual 3D layers.

More effects in 16bit and 32bit, including the Cycore effects.

Dropped in CS6

Sadly, not all the features of CS5.5 made the cut, so before jumping into the CS6 bandwagon, let’s have a minute of silence for the beloved one we lost:

Pixel Bender support, so all your Pb effects are gone.
Photoshop 3D support
Photoshop Video layers
FreeForm