Adobe After Effects 26.5.0 (macOS)

Adobe After Effects 26.5 runs on both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs with macOS 14 Sonoma or newer. You need 16 GB RAM, 8 GB of free disk space and a 1440x900 display at minimum. If Rosetta is not present, the installer tells you to add it and run the setup again.

Animate text, graphics, and footage frame by frame

• Animating text, graphics, illustrations and any layer frame by frame or with presets
• Compositing with masks and layers
• Colour correction, blur, sharpening and footage distortion
• Removing objects and stabilising shaky video
• Creating motion where there was none

Rosetta required even on Apple Silicon

• You need to remove any older version before installing
• Rosetta may be required even on Apple Silicon
• Disk cache for Object Matte results persists between sessions, which adds to storage use

A compositor’s afternoon

A freelancer cutting a two-minute product demo hits a wall. The client wants four on-screen text callouts to slide in, hold for three seconds, then fade — timed to a voiceover that keeps shifting. Keyframing each by hand would take half the morning and still need re-timing when the voiceover edit lands tomorrow. They drop the VO track into After Effects, mark layer markers on the words, convert the markers to keyframes on a null, and parent four text layers to it. One adjustment on the null retimes every callout. By lunch they have sent a preview and still have time to rough out a background blur pass on the product shot.

Colour-code safe areas by delivery spec

Version 26.5 tightens a few workflows that quietly eat time. Custom guide colours mean you can colour-code safe areas by delivery spec — red for 4:3 centre-cut, blue for 1.85:1 — without sticky notes on the display bezel.

The Object Matte cache-to-disk change matters more than it sounds. On a long session with multiple matte passes, quitting After Effects no longer throws away computed matte data. Reopen the project and the matte is ready. The trade-off is disk space; the cache folder grows faster, so you need to check it weekly if your boot drive is tight.

Adobe’s release notes mention unspecified fixes alongside those features. In practice, that tends to mean fewer crashes when swapping between the Composition and Layer panels on complex timelines.

Point disk cache to an external SSD

After the installer finishes and you have dealt with the Rosetta prompt, there are a few moves that save friction later.

Set the disk cache location to an external SSD if you have one. Open Preferences > Media & Disk Cache and point it away from the boot drive. Version 26.5’s persistent Object Matte cache sits in the same folder, so the space it grabs will not surprise you a month later.

Check the guide colour defaults early. The new guide editing controls are in the View menu under Guides.

If you work with a team that shares project files, agree on a guide colour key before anyone starts. Nothing slows a handoff like a senior animator asking why every comp has lime-green guides at odd positions.

Run a short test project that uses Object Matte on a 10-second clip, save it, quit After Effects, and reopen it. That confirms the disk cache is writing and reading correctly before you bank a client job on it.

Snags that come up

CCXProcess or error #1 after installing

This is the Rosetta problem. Even on Apple Silicon, some Adobe components look for it. Open Terminal and run:

Wait for the process to finish, then launch the installer again. No reboot needed.

Guides not locking to percentages

Right-click a guide and check the context menu — percentage positioning is not the default for guides dragged from the ruler. You need to set it per guide or switch the default in the guide editing panel. If the option is greyed out, you are running an older build; 26.5 enables it across both architectures.

Object Matte cache filling the disk

After a week of heavy work, the cache folder can balloon. Purge it from Edit > Purge > All Memory & Disk Cache or set a lower maximum disk cache size in Preferences. The persistent cache is useful, but it is not self-limiting.

Installation stalling on an older machine

Use Adobe’s own cleaner tool or delete the old application bundle manually, then restart the Mac before installing 26.5. The package instructions are clear on this, but it is the step most often skipped when someone is in a hurry.

• Version 26.5, the September 2026 release
• Guides get percentage-based positioning, edge pinning, custom colours and better editing controls
• Object Matte results can be cached to disk between sessions
• New features and important fixes

• macOS 14 Sonoma or newer
• Apple Silicon or Intel
• 16 GB RAM
• 8 GB available disk space
• 1440x900 display