Adobe has released After Effects 24.0, the latest version of the compositing software.

The update adds Next-Gen Roto Brush, the latest version of Adobe’s AI-powered rotoscoping tool, new OCIO effects, and GPU-accelerated HEVC, H.264 and R3D decoding.

Another update to the AI-trained Roto Brush
The biggest change in After Effects 24.0 is Next-Gen Roto Brush, an improved version of the Roto Brush, After Effects’ rotoscoping tool.

It enables users to create roto masks by roughly painting out the part of the frame to be isolated, with the software automatically generating the full mask and propagating it through the other frames of the video being rotoscoped.

On paper, the new version isn’t as big an update as 2020’s Roto Brush 2.0, which applied machine learning to generate masks faster and more accurately.

However, Adobe still describes it as a “major advance”, improving speed, quality of the masks generated, and stability, particularly in shots where the object being masked is occluded by foreground objects, and on hard-to-track footage like hair and transparencies.

Better OCIO support, new scripting options, and GPU-accelerated video decoding
The update also extends support for movie industry color management standard OpenColorIO (OCIO), introduced earlier this year in After Effects 23.2.

After Effects now has the OCIO Look Transform and OCIO CDL Transform as effects under the Color Correction category.

Other changes include a new set of scripting hooks for text and font manipulation, intended to make it possible to match the features available in the After Effects UI via scripting.

In addition, encoding and decoding of video footage using the HEVC (H.265) and H.264 codecs is now hardware-accelerated on Intel’s discrete Intel Arc GPUs.

GPU-accelerated decoding of R3D (RED RAW) footage – previously only available on macOS – is now also available on Windows, on AMD and NVIDIA GPUs with at least 6GB of GPU memory.

Price, system requirements and release date
After Effects 24.0 is available for Windows 10+ and macOS 12.0+ on a rental-only basis. In the online documentation, the update is also referred to as the October 2023 release.

Subscriptions to After Effects cost $31.49/month or $239.88/year, while All Apps subscriptions, which provide access to over 20 of Adobe’s creative tools, cost $82.49/month or $599.88/year.

Read more about the new features in After Effects 24.0 in the online release notes