After Effects 7 gets an extra exclamation point, when compared to its newly released video editor sibling Premiere Pro 2.0.  Less because of its new features, which are many, but more because a new version of After Effects always nets me a few extra weeks of tweaking old mo-graph to make it even better.  If you're at all familiar with the After Effects franchise, typically an X.0 release is less neat and new than a .5 release (5.5, 6.5, hopefully 7.5.)

The most important new feature, for me anyway, is the addition of a more advanced graph editor.  Previous versions of After Effects allow you to modify velocity via a graph, but the results are (were, yay!) often less satisfying than After Effects' big neighborhood bully software (like Shake, Fusion and Combustion, to name a few.)  One thing that doesn't make me happy is the inclusion of templates.  If motion has shown us anything, it's that give people templates, and they'll use them, and use them, and use them, till it makes your eyes bleed.

The other major enhancement is (improved) Flash Video support.  Realize After Effects supported Flash export before, but it was really horrible.  You could only export solids, and the implementation was rather horrible.  Now, at least they say, the export to Flash is an export to Flash video.  I'd assume, with the whole merger nonsense, it should work pretty well.

YAY!  New toys!!