With the underlying premise of Creative Cloud comes the benefit of more frequent updates to the software. One of the drawbacks is that you don’t often get to truly find out what is new due to the frequency of the releases – Which is not necessarily a bad thing!
One of the features that may have snuck by you is a feature in After Effects Creative Cloud called copy with property links. Using copy / paste with property links when copying an effect, will allow you to use one effect for more than one layer.
Imagine having a blur that can affect more than one layer… if you change the blur amount, you only really need to change it in the one spot, and the other layers using that effect will update. This is a huge workflow improvement over changing blur values across multiple layers manually.
Mind you the way paste with property links works is using After Effects expressions behind the scenes… not the most resource efficient way of having an effect work on multiple layers, but it works!
