Hello from my virtual IBC studio at Musikpark Mannheim—complete with coffee, cables, and a bit of latency. For this Digital Production feature, I sat down with Victoria Nece from Adobe at their booth in Amsterdam to talk about what’s new in After Effects.

Victoria is one of those product managers who actually uses the software she’s talking about. Her demos are fast, her shortcuts surgical, and her experience in Broadcast and Motion Graphics shines through. This time she came armed with three deceptively simple tools: Quick Offset, Paste Reversed Keyframes, and Smooth Zoom. Plus a look at new 3D lighting and compositing features that make After Effects feel distinctly modern again.

Quick Offset: My Favourite New Shortcut

We started with Quick Offset, and honestly, it’s the kind of thing that makes you wonder how you ever worked without it. By holding Option + Command (Mac), the cursor switches to a new “staggered layers” icon. From there, you can click and drag directly in the timeline to spread layers or keyframes over time. No expressions. No maths. No “did I offset the null or the child?”.

Victoria demoed this with a map of the U.S. states and locators sliding in at once. Within seconds, she dragged out the timing into a clean cascade. The motion instantly looked more designed, and no spreadsheet-level calculations were involved. It’s tactile, it’s quick, and it’s one of those updates that feels designed by someone who actually animates for a living.

Paste Reversed Keyframes: Exit Stage Left

Once everything is animated on, the next challenge is getting it off the screen again. Enter Paste Reversed Keyframes. Victoria showed how you can now copy keyframes, then paste them in reverse from the Edit menu. The animation plays backwards, perfectly timed to the original entrance. She used it to make states appear, wiggle, then fade back out—all without touching expressions or timelines manually. For those of us who still remember the “calculate offset” method, this feels like closure.

Smooth Zoom: Scroll, Don’t Jump

Then came Smooth Zoom, another small fix that quietly transforms daily work. Previously, zooming in the composition viewer jumped in awkward increments. Now, scrolling in and out is continuous! Victoria scrolled through a complex comp like she was skating. You can zoom, pan, and adjust keyframes without losing context. It’s one of those features that doesn’t sell subscriptions, but saves hours over time.

A 3D Scooter, an Environment Light, and a Shadow Catcher

After the 2D fun, Victoria opened a 3D scene: a scooter textured in Substance 3D. After Effects now imports GLB, glTF, FBX, and OBJ models directly. She added an Environment Light, which uses an image, video, or animation as a lighting sphere around the scene. Her demo used a live-action plate as the light source—turning the background into illumination and reflection. When the actor walked into frame, you could literally see her reflection in the scooter’s headlight. Next came the Shadow Catcher, a transparent solid that receives shadows but hides everything else. It’s a quick way to ground a 3D object in live footage without third-party plugins. And yes, you can pick the shadow colour from the footage itself. No more neon-black shadows that ruin composites.

Beta Lighting: Spotlights, Parallel Lights, and Speed

In the public beta, Adobe is testing spot and parallel light shadows that render faster and allow more precise art direction. Performance has improved as well—playback and caching both feel snappier, although Adobe has not published formal benchmarks. As Victoria said, “After Effects is updated almost every day.” Given how often animators have begged for smaller, quality-of-life fixes, that’s welcome news.

Tested in the Booth, Try It in Production

All these features—Quick Offset, Paste Reversed Keyframes, Smooth Zoom, and the new 3D environment tools—are available now. The expanded lighting system is in public beta. I’ve seen many After Effects demos at IBC, but this one stood out because it’s not about buzzwords or “revolutionary pipelines”. It’s about fixing small irritations that slow artists down.

Before rolling these tools into client work, test them on your own setups—especially the 3D lighting features, which still vary by GPU and renderer. But if you spend your life inside the AE timeline, Quick Offset alone might make your week.

The post After Effects Gets Hands-On: Victoria Nece Shows Off Quick Offset & Co. first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Nils Calles.

The IBC announcement

At IBC 2025, Adobe confirmed that Premiere Pro 25.5 integrates the full Film Impact transition and effect library directly into the application. The company is emphasising this as both a creative expansion and a practical elimination of a common subscription burden. Until this release, Film Impact was a standalone plug-in collection costing €15–30 per month. With version 25.5, the entire catalogue is bundled into Creative Cloud at no additional cost. Adobe is making this available to all Premiere Pro users beginning 12 September 2025.

Film Impact’s evolution from plug-in to built-in

Film Impact is a developer with a reputation for stable, GPU-accelerated transitions and effects widely used in professional editing. Adobe’s acquisition, reported earlier in 2025, was not simply a brand buyout but an absorption of a mature, commercially proven toolset. This toolset now appears in Premiere Pro without any separate installation or licensing. The effects are accessed in the Effects panel, or through the dedicated Film Impact Dashboard under the Window > Extensions menu, where editors can browse live previews of each transition.

The catalogue is wide. It contains polished versions of dissolves, blurs, and wipes—updated variants of editing staples that now render more smoothly and play in real time. It also includes more aggressive stylisation tools. Earthquake, glitch, distortion, chaos, and VHS-damage are among the more destructive transition types now standardised inside Premiere. For editors seeking more abstract visuals, the library also contains kaleidoscopic transformations and 3D transitions that add spatial depth between cuts.

Crucially, all of these tools are GPU-accelerated. In practical terms, this means an end to the familiar red render bar above transitions that once required preview rendering before playback. According to Adobe, the effects remain real-time even under heavy parameter customisation. This GPU dependence is a direct continuation of Film Impact’s engineering focus before the acquisition, where the company consistently positioned its transitions as faster to preview than comparable third-party solutions.

One unique feature of Film Impact that Adobe has retained is the “Surprise Me” button. Instead of default settings, this function instantly generates randomised variations of an effect, allowing editors to preview unconventional results and select creative alternatives without manually keyframing or duplicating effect instances.

Expanding motion capabilities inside Premiere

Adobe’s strategy is clearly to offload simpler motion design work into Premiere Pro, reducing the need for round-tripping through After Effects for straightforward graphics animation. Several of the new Film Impact tools are aimed at titles and logos. Editors can now transform static text into 3D animated lettering with shadow casting and depth within seconds. Logos can be duplicated and animated using pre-built behaviours, creating the illusion of bespoke motion graphics without building compositions. Titles can be animated using light sweeps, glow effects, wiggling distortions, bounces, and pops. While these animations remain parameter-driven and customisable, they are designed to produce acceptable results directly from their default states, speeding up editorial workflows.

Beyond motion graphics, Film Impact effects now serve grading and look-development purposes. Editors can apply glows, halation, and lens echoes, or simulate atmospheric lighting through volumetric rays. Bokeh effects generate photorealistic out-of-focus textures. Red, green, and blue channels can be shifted independently to correct fluorescent light imbalances. Chromatic aberration is available for stylistic distortion. Blend modes can be applied directly within the effect framework. Vignette tools no longer rely on simple oval shapes, but allow arbitrary warping to match composition geometry. A camera shake simulator is also included, able to add handheld movement to static tripod shots. Collectively, these tools extend Premiere Pro’s built-in grading capabilities beyond simple Lumetri adjustments.

Timeline and playback refinements

Parallel to the new effects, Adobe has targeted workflow bottlenecks in the timeline. For years, dragging a clip within Premiere’s sequence produced only an empty rectangle, requiring editors to guess sync relationships with underlying audio. In version 25.5, audio waveforms remain visible even during clip movement or when performing ripple, roll, and rate-stretch edits. This change is accompanied by markers and keyframes staying visible as well, preventing alignment errors during complex edits.

Another update addresses fading. Editors can now apply and adjust multiple fade or crossfade transitions across clips simultaneously. Combined with last year’s visual fade handles, this reduces repetitive clicking and improves batch adjustments.

Adobe has set a clear benchmark for playback responsiveness: reducing the delay between pressing play and seeing frames to under 0.1 seconds. The company states that significant progress has already been made toward this target, and that further optimisations will follow. This represents a technical focus on perceived latency—an issue that has consistently affected longform editing in earlier Premiere releases.

Codec support and GPU acceleration

Premiere Pro 25.5 introduces new codec handling and GPU acceleration. Hardware decoding of 10-bit 4:2:2 H.264 and HEVC media is now available on NVIDIA’s latest Blackwell GPUs, enabling real-time playback of formats traditionally known for high quality and low file size but difficult decoding. Canon Cinema RAW Light now benefits from hardware acceleration, providing smoother playback and up to tenfold faster exports. ARRI workflows also see support for ARRIRAW HDE (High Density Encoding). In this mode, footage is encoded at 60 percent of its original file size while retaining image data. Premiere Pro can now natively play back this optimised ARRIRAW format without relying on third-party plug-ins.

Small but necessary workflow fixes

Alongside headline features, Adobe has implemented several incremental corrections. Editors can now set a default font for captions and text, eliminating the need to manually override the long-standing default of Minion Pro. Keyboard shortcuts have been extended, making it possible to toggle track mute and solo based on track targeting without mouse interaction. A persistent bug has also been corrected in the Effect Controls panel, where adding a keyframe at the last frame of a clip previously jumped to the beginning of the following clip.

For high-end colour workflows, 16-bit PNG import is now supported, and metadata handling has been improved across PNG, DNxHR, and DNxHD formats, reducing errors when exchanging files with other finishing environments. To improve organisation, new Sequence Colour Tabs allow editors to colour-code timelines, adding a layer of visual reference to complex sequences.

After Effects 25.5

The companion release of After Effects 25.5 includes fewer features, but they target daily efficiency for motion designers. The standout is Quick Offset, a tool that allows multiple keyframes or entire layers to be shifted in time with one click-and-drag action. This eliminates the need to manually adjust dozens of layers individually in large compositions. In addition, zooming and navigation inside the composition viewer has been re-engineered for smoother response, particularly when magnifying to pixel level for detailed work. Cache handling has been refined, improving preview and playback responsiveness.

Availability and scope

Premiere Pro 25.5 and After Effects 25.5 will roll out beginning 12 September 2025, timed with IBC in Amsterdam. The Film Impact integration is included in the main install of Premiere Pro and requires no separate download.

Adobe has not published a comprehensive mapping of Film Impact’s original plug-ins against their new built-in equivalents. It remains unclear whether the entire legacy library has been preserved or whether some plug-ins were excluded. Until further documentation is available, users are advised to compare older Film Impact installations with the new built-in set before migrating active projects.

At IBC, Adobe also showcased new enterprise-level updates for Frame.io, including metadata handling on account level, low-code connectors for workflow integration, and additional sharing and security options. These developments affect collaborative workflows but fall outside the scope of Premiere Pro and will be covered separately.

As with any new release, these features should be tested thoroughly before deployment in production environments. Stability, render consistency, and interoperability with shared project files remain critical factors for professional pipelines.

The post Premiere Pro gains 90+ Film Impact effects – plug-in now built-in first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.

The August 2025 release of Adobe After Effects (version 25.4) introduces Quick Offset, a direct way to stagger multiple layers or keyframes in the Timeline. Holding Cmd + Option (macOS) or Ctrl + Alt (Windows) while dragging adjusts timing so that the first selection stays fixed, the last moves the full distance, and intermediate layers are evenly spaced. The same works for keyframes across layers, aided by on-screen “Total Offset” and “Per Layer” timing indicators.

Paste Just the Formatting

A new Paste Text Formatting Only command allows users to transfer styling, such as font, size, colour, and weight, without overwriting the text content itself. This makes it possible to unify typography without losing scripted or manually typed content.

HDR with CICP Metadata

After Effects 25.4 now supports CICP (Colour Information, Colour Primaries) metadata for HDR import and export. This ensures colour-space information is preserved when moving HDR content between formats or devices.

Info at Your Fingertips

In the Effects & Presets panel, each effect now has an Info button linking directly to relevant documentation or detailed descriptions, reducing the need to search for technical references elsewhere.

Compatibility and Caution

The update supports Windows 10 or later and macOS 12.0 or later, with macOS Monterey (12.x) excluded for this release. Users on unsupported systems must remain on After Effects 25.3.2 or earlier. As always, new versions should be tested in a controlled environment before deployment in production.

Release Notes

The post After Effects 25.4 Lands in August: HDR Metadata, Text-Format Paste, and Layer Staggering first appeared on DIGITAL PRODUCTION and was written by Bela Beier.