Adobe® After Effects® CS3 Professional

First off, what is After Effects? It’s mainly used to create high end visual effects and motion graphics for film, video, DVD, the web, and mobile devices.

As for the new version, there’s a ton of new features and enhancements! My favorite: Puppet Tool!

Top reasons to upgrade to Adobe® After Effects® CS3 Professional

1. Shape Layers—Easily create and animate vector graphics with new Shape Layers. Add and animate strokes, fills, gradients, and vector effects. You can convert text into shapes and animate them just like any other shape type.
2. Puppet tool—This new, fast, and intuitive animation tool lets you squash and stretch images or text to bring it to life as an animated character. Use Motion Sketch to record the position and speed of your puppet movements, the Starch tool to stiffen areas of the character, and the Overlap tool to control the depth of elements of your puppet.
3. Adobe Photoshop® CS3 Extended integration—Enjoy a streamlined workflow with support for importing layered Photoshop images that include video layers. Sophisticated Photoshop Layer Styles can be easily modified or animated within After Effects. Import Vanishing Point data from Photoshop into After Effects to build 3D compositions automatically.
4. Tight integration with Adobe Flash® CS3 Professional—Work more efficiently to create and edit Flash animations. Preserve vectors from animations created in After Effects for lean and clean delivery, and create Flash Video more easily. Import SWF files as vectors with alpha channels preserved, and batch render Flash videos with embedded cue points.
5. Per-character 3D text animation—Explore new text animation possibilities by making individual characters in your text—or an entire phrase—move and rotate in 3D space.
6. Brainstorm—Jump-start animations with Brainstorm, a new user interface that offers variations on selected design and animation parameters. Choose which properties and effects you want to explore, and Brainstorm will propose animated variations.
7. Complete color management workflow—Enable color management simply by selecting a Project Working Space. Doing so helps ensure the color accuracy of imported files as they are displayed and rendered and allows you to preview how footage will look on other devices.
8. Adobe Clip Notes—Streamline the review and approval process. Render your work into an Adobe PDF file that enables anyone with Adobe Reader ® software to make timecode-accurate comments. When you import the comments into After Effects, they appear as markers on the Timeline.
9. Enhanced performance—Harness your computer’s processing power with new multicore and graphics acceleration plus disk caching so you can spend less time waiting and more time creating. Distribute rendering across your entire network to maximize output performance.
10. 3D compositions from Vanishing Point—Export Vanishing Point data from Photoshop Extended, and then import into After Effects to automatically build a 3D composition from the 2D Photoshop image.