The After Effects 2022 release, aka the October 2021 update. includes Multi-Frame Rendering (MFR), which accelerates After Effects up to 4x with the CPU. In addition, they’ve added a Composition Profiler, which shows the CPU usage of each layer in the timeline. Finally, After Effects notifies you about renders!

What’s New in After Effects 2022 – October 2021 release

The following is from the Adobe Help Documents, which you can find here.

Faster Previews and Renders with Multi-Frame Rendering

Accelerate your creative process by taking advantage of the full power of your system’s CPU cores when previewing and rendering. After Effects automatically adjusts resource usage to render your compositions as fast as possible on your machine.

Reimagined Render Queue with Remote Notifications

The Render Queue, also taking advantage of Multi-Frame Rendering, highlights the most important information such as your rendering progress. The reimagined Render Queue highlights information such as, what’s rendering, how much time is remaining, rendering progress, and how it’s using your system. Get notifications even on your smartwatch, when renders are complete via the Creative Cloud desktop or mobile app.

Composition Profiler

Sometimes complex projects in After Effects can produce bottlenecks in rendering performance. This feature enables you to make different decisions to optimize your system resources. Know which layers are less performant while previewing, enabling you to streamline complex projects and reduce rendering bottlenecks.

Learn which layers and effects in your composition are taking the most time to render in relation to other layers and effects. The layer profiler highlights which areas of the composition impact your processing time and enable you to optimize your project for faster rendering as you iterate.

Speculative previews

Work faster even when you’re not working. After Effects renders your composition when it has been idle for a set amount of time, so your composition is ready to preview when you are. Render frames while idle for an improved preview experience. After Effects renders in the background, enabling you to playback or scrub compositions quickly.

Export Faster with Adobe Media Encoder

With Multi-Frame Rendering, export your compositions up to 4x faster using the full power of your system and without upgrading your hardware. Render while you work on your compositions while Adobe Media Encoder renders faster in the background. This update maximizes the full power of your system and enables you to continue working in After Effects while Adobe Media Encoder renders your compositions in the background.

Improved playback for 10-bit  HEVC

New hardware-accelerated decoding for 10-bit HEVC 422 provides improved playback and editing on Intel Windows systems.

Enable LUT Interpolation method selection

Enables you to select the LUT Interpolation method from the dropdown under Project Settings. Currently, After Effects only supports Trilinear or Tetrahedral interpolation.

Unified version numbers

With this major release, all the Adobe video and audio applications will align on version number 22.0, making it easier to ensure compatibility across the applications.

Currently in Beta

Scene Edit Detection

Powered by Adobe Sensei, automatically detect scene changes in an edited clip and place scenes as layers for a faster project setup. Scene Edit Detection makes it much quicker and easier to reuse part of an edited video clip.