Mark Christiansen has a first look at After Effects CS 5.5 and he think that it’s a compelling upgrade.

For additional detail, see the product page (with video) and Todd Kopriva’s big outline of the new features in After Effects CS5.5: What’s new and changed. See also news on Premiere in his other post, and more from Adobe in Introducing Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 Product Family.

Here’s the short list of new features snagged from Todd Kopriva, who linked to the revised AE Help system :

• Warp Stabilizer effect for stabilizing motion within a shot
• Camera Lens Blur effect and new camera layer settings relating to depth-of-field blur and bokeh
• ability to read, use, and preserve source timecode, including with an improved Timecode effect
• stereoscopic 3D camera rig and improved 3D Glasses effect
• better disk caching and default memory settings, for improved performance
• light fall-off
• improved raw digital cinema features, including CinemaDNG import and expanded RED (R3D) features (e.g., REDcolor2, REDgamma2, REDlogFilm, better curves and levels UI)
• improved and expanded color look-up table (LUT) features
• XDCAM EX and XDCAM HD output (as MXF OP1a)
• 🙂 ability to save a project backward as an After Effects CS5 project

Below, Chris Meyer introduces his favorite new features in AE CS 5.5 in a complete video training series, AE CS 5.5: New Creative Techniques Introduction.