With the arrival of Creative Cloud, Adobe has surprised us with more changes than ever before from one version of software to the next. Here some improvements I’ve been waiting for and some issues that have finally been addressed.

Media Encoder CC //

You can now easily encode videos in Media Encoder by matching source attributes. In the CS6 version, some formats had this option, and others didn’t. Now, it is consistently convenient and if you want to match all but some attributes, it’s as easy as unchecking a box.

For example, If you want to quickly convert an MOV to an MP4 and you want FPS, Audio, and Aspect Ratio to stay the same, but you want to change the resolution, it’s as easy as unchecking a box.

Flash CC //

The following changes in Flash are very small and seem insignificant, but they honestly should’ve been implemented ages ago.

Guide Multiple Layers – Now you can select more than one layer and guide them all at once. Before, this was only possible with plugins.

Import Directly to Specified Folders - Finally, when you drag and drop files into a folder in Flash, it stays there and doesn’t navigate back to the root bin.

After Effects CC //

For a while now, After Effects has done an amazing thing called “Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously”. This is an action that is used for rendering and previewing in after effects. The way it works is that it opens up multiple instances of After Effects that use CPU cores to run background rendering processes. This means that if your computer has a decent processor and RAM options, you can render much faster. If you open up the AE Preferences panel and click on “Memory & Multiprocessing”, you will be given the option to enable this action.

The great things that have been added in CC, are that now you can set Rendering Multiple Frames to run during a specified process. For example, you can set it to be enabled during output renders or RAM preview. This is great because since AE must open up multiple instances of itself, this can take a lot of time in the beginning. If you just want to do a quick RAM preview, you don’t really want to wait for these instances to start up. Here is a screen shot that shows, what these extra AE instances look like when being called:

“After Effects” is the actual software you ware interacting with using UI. “aeselflink” is the name of the extra After Effects instances. Also available in CC now is the ability to allocate more RAM (up to 6GB) to each processor core being used in the background.

To get a more detailed idea of how After Effects is powered, and how to take advantage of its resources, consider taking this class:
After Effects & Premiere Pro Performance Workshop

Here is the section that speaks more about multi-processing:
Using ‘Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously’ Multiprocessing

These aren’t necessarily the features that “sold” everyone on the Creative Cloud, but they are certainly worth pointing out and beginning to add to your workflow.