This is the program that brought high-end video compositing to the personal desktop back in the early 1990’s and it remains the most successful and loved program in the category. This is saying a lot for a program that has had a fair amount of very accomplished competition from the likes of Apple’s Shake (now just $499 and placed on Apple’s kill list) and Autodesk’s Combustion ($995).

While no program does it all and each of these applications has their own strong points and following, it is safe to say that AE does most of what most people need in their day to day work, does it in an easy to understand manner, and as expected does it in a way that works with the rest of the CS3PP suite.

If you do high-end film effects or just love working nodally then you probably already have Shake (and are wondering what you will use now that Apple has killed it off), and if you do a lot of 3D work with 3DS MAX, then Combustion is a great option for you. For the rest of us AE has been a comfortable and reliable home for a good long time.

Aside from one stellar new toolset that we will discuss soon, most of this release could best be described as a good evolutionary step with logical additions. This is not to minimize its value, in fact that makes this a better major upgrade than many from Adobe have been over the years. This version will make your day to day run better both creatively and on the project management side. But first, lets talk about that great new feature set.

Puppet Tools is a new tool set for animation as opposed to compositing. It will let the animator selectively deform, stretch and animate items on any layer. It does this by dicing a layer’s content (raster, vector or type elements all work) into polygonal meshes. Then “pins” are added which are used to push and pull a section or “starch” spray is added to lock down sections.

The result are controls that let creatives work in a whole new way. This is really exciting for us to see in its first release, and we expect Puppet Tools to become one of the most popular features of this release. So popular in fact that we expect to see smaller applications spawn off with copycat controls at lower price points in the future.

The other new creative tools include the Shapes Layer that let creatives develop a range of vector shapes, all with a broad range of attribute controls that are fully animatable. Though a vector pen has long been part of AE’s tools, this allows the non-pen savvy among us to create graphics. We can see this becoming popular with many motion graphics enthusiasts and expect to see TV commercials using it soon.

A welcome improvement is the moving of Flash video from “Export…” to the standard rendering queue interface. It now has a number of new options, however it should be noted that the vector based Shapes Layers do not export to Flash format as vector art, though this is certainly on Adobe’s list for the furture.

Of more minor notes: Brainstorm interface which automates a Variations style series of concepts for your perusal, and also the addition of per-character animation capabilities for 3D text will both excite some users. The there is the addition of a complete color management system which will perhaps excite nobody, but non-the-less is of significant importance for controlling how your projects look across the range of TV’s, webpages and iPods.

Surprisingly enough, our favorite feature number two after awesome Puppet Tools, is a little workflow called Clip Notes. This lets the editor export a video clip to be either embedded or linked to a PDF file. This PDF gets mailed out to anyone involved in the approval process of a project. The PDF can be encrypted for safe keeping on its way to the recipients. Each viewer can make time-based comments along the clip and then press a Send button to automatically return the comments to the editor.

Upon return, the editor imports all Clip Notes into AE and time-accurate cue points are created for each note, along with a notation of who the author of each note was. This is like a more sophisticated version of comment-tracking in MS Word. We think it will be very helpful both to the editor who must deal with instructions from numerous experts, and also streamline the process for those technically challenged folks on the client side.

General workflow is speedy and efficient, and we tested it with a number of challenging files, especially HDV mpegs which use serious inter-frame compression. Results of responsiveness did vary at times, but the overall speed with which AE dealt with the source files was peppy and very usable on good machines. It did on occasion not recognize our HDV files (which had been captured using Premiere Pro CS3), even ones it had been able to read before. Quiting and re-running the software solved that glitch each time we tried.

Interoperability with other CS3 applications includes being able to drop AE clips right into Premiere Pro without the need to pre-render them (more on this later). There is the enhanced Flash rendering to queue functionality as mentioned, so you can now stack up a long list of rendering for Flash and leave for the night. This is not only a factor of Flash’s new ownership, but a recognition of it increased importance as a professional destination format.

On the input end of the workflow, the linkage between PSD files going into AE has been enhanced so that additional adjustment and style layer features are supported as are guidelines. Grouped images in PS can now be brought in as pre-compified layers when the “import as comp” options are selected. Live updating is supported: Update a layer in PS and save it, and it is automatically updated in AE.

Bottom Line: A big Siskel & Ebert style thumbs up. This is a solid upgrade and a great performer. Even as a standalone application this upgrade is well worth the $299 upgrade fee. As part of this suite of tools it’s a no-brainer. Certainly an upgrade is only good if you need the new features, but we think this may be one of those times when you will start to use some of the new tools and in 6 months wonder how you ever got along without it. Animators specifically will find the new Puppet Tools a blast to use and will open a whole new way of working for them to enjoy.