Yesterday we celebrated the launch of Adobe Creative Cloud 2014. Here there’s a first look at what are my favorite top new feature in After Effect:

Compositing Options for Each Effect

Now every single effect has his Compositing option with the Effect Opacity property for each effect, same as the old Blend with Original control in a few effects in the previous versions of After Effects. But the most important feature is that you can add masks references to any single effect.

Key Cleaner effect and Advanced Spill Suppressor effect

The Key Cleaner effect recovers detail from a keyed scene and the new Spill Suppressor removes color spill on a subject from a colored background.

Auto adjustment in Curves effect and new user Interface

To adjust the curves in the Curves effect automatically, click the Auto button beneath the curves in the Effect Controls panel.

The curves graph panel is now resizable using buttons immediately above the curves.

You can directly select and manipulate the individual color channels curves without using the Channel menu, and the curves are drawn more smoothly.

The other new features consist in the more integration with Abobe Premiere, text editable in Premiere, importing masks from Premiere Pro, some bug fixed, new codec and algorithms, and last but not least a panel that improves HTML5 that have access to the entire After Effects scripting!

List of the all features:

• Key Cleaner effect and Advanced Spill Suppressor effect
• text templates created in After Effects editable in Premiere Pro
• compositing options for each effect, including ability to confine the area affected by each effect with masks
• import of masks from Premiere Pro
• HTML5 panels using CEP infrastructure
• Kuler panel
• ProEXR v1.9: higher-performance OpenEXR importer, updated IDentifier and EXtractoR effects
• import of Sony RAW footage (raw files from F5, F55, and F65 cameras)
• import of MPEG-4 SStP (Simple Studio Profile) Sony SR MXF files
• video preview on external monitor using Mercury Transmit
• scripting access to render settings and output module settings
• automatic adjustment in Curves effect, plus improvements to Curves effect user interface
• menu command to add fonts from Typekit
• digital Cinema Package (DCP) export through Adobe Media Encoder