- Layer Mask — cut a layer with a shape you draw inside it — Until now the editor could hide pixels three ways and none of them was a mask on a layer. Layer Mask is its own inspector section on video, image, text, shape and motion layers: switch it on and reshape the mask on the canvas by dragging its points. Several masks per layer combine the way After Effects combines them — Add, Subtract, Intersect, Difference — each with its own Invert, Opacity, Feather and Expand, and Grow advances the edge outward over the clip for a reveal that needs no keyframes. Everything on the layer respects the mask: glow traces its edge, camera defocus blurs its silhouette. Every mask property animates, including the outline itself, so a rectangle at the start can morph into a circle at the end.
- A real 3D set, lit from one place — A Rig layer lights every 3D model in the project at once — directional, point, spot, ambient and sky lights, aimed by azimuth and elevation rather than by a vector you have to solve — with real shadows and a cyclorama: nine studio sets your models stand on and cast against. Ordinary flat layers can join that scene too, intersecting models, receiving shadows and occluding one another properly. Lights and path points are draggable directly in the 3D view, and what you frame there is what you render.
- A camera you can set by numbers — The camera now has a movement type — Free Movement, Motion Path or Camera Rig. The rig gives you orbit, dolly, crane, push-in, truck, spiral and handheld moves with ten presets, keyed to animate the moment you apply one instead of sitting frozen on their opening frame. A path you drew by hand is never rewritten by it, and you can save rigs of your own.
- Renders you can follow, and that no longer stall — The render bar is now a checklist of the whole job — preparing footage, rendering frames, finalizing, saving — naming the step in progress, what it is working on right now, how far into it you are and the time remaining. Footage that used to jam the renderer minutes in, whether a near-lossless master or a multi-gigabyte clip, is recognised and handled rather than failed, and a render that was merely slow to start is no longer abandoned.
- New layer effects, and transitions that carry a lens — Repetile tiles a layer into an animatable grid whose tiles need not be identical, Extract keys on luminance with a live histogram and a keyframable range, Curves grades from a reference, and a track matte now keys on the matte layer as you styled it and works inside a sequence. Zoom to Point and Move to Point became Advanced Zoom and Advanced Movement, adding a Fisheye that swells into the cut and flattens out again and a Wiggle that trembles harder as the cut approaches and settles as the new clip arrives.
- Voice, media and three new templates — Clean sweeps the ums, the uhs and the dead air out of a take; the Voice Editor opens on the take you had selected and can re-speak a whole one in a click; recordings, AI voice and extracted tracks are filed into folders instead of piling up on the board. The Media Library paints its tiles from thumbnails made once on first view rather than full-size originals, and a Sound, Assets and Music Library sit alongside board media, shared by every board. Three new MotionFast templates arrive as well: Code Window, AI Chat and a Comparison Table.
- Windows installers are signed end to end — Every executable inside the app, the uninstaller and the setup file itself are signed, and each release is now installed and launched on a real Windows machine with Smart App Control in enforcement before it is allowed to ship.
v9.4.0 — Layer masks, a real 3D set, and renders you can actually follow
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