You will never see Motion credited as the compositor in a major motion picture like Shake was. No one uses Motion for high-end work like they did with Shake. I challenge anyone to find an article with someone crediting Motion for FX work the way Shake was credited on movies like LOTR. I can't even find an article crediting Motion on a low budget Hollywood film.
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Apple Finally Discontinues Shake?
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You will never see Motion credited as the compositor in a major motion picture like Shake was. No one uses Motion for high-end work like they did with Shake. I challenge anyone to find an article with someone crediting Motion for FX work the way Shake was credited on movies like LOTR. I can't even find an article crediting Motion on a low budget Hollywood film.
We could not have done The Lord of the Rings trilogy without Shakes fast compositing speed, quality and extensibility, said Joe Letteri, Weta Digitals Academy Award winning visual effects supervisor. Shake was the cornerstone of our visual compositing pipeline.
I'm getting confused about all the praise Motion is getting here. Motion is a lightweight motion-graphics app for lightweight motion-graphics designers. Period. There is no competition for After Effects in Motion, except maybe editors who want a side-hobby. For motion-graphics powerhouses, there is no replacement for a solid 3D app and After Effects, After Effects, After Effects.
Of course Motion is not a compositor. Shake is not a motion-graphics program. After Effects is a lot of both and is unparalleled (to use that word someone actually used to describe Motion. What???) and will remain unparalleled until some serious company puts some serious work in. Some people hope that Maxon will do it. That would be nice. Here's hoping.
Of course Motion is not a compositor. Shake is not a motion-graphics program. After Effects is a lot of both and is unparalleled (to use that word someone actually used to describe Motion. What???) and will remain unparalleled until some serious company puts some serious work in. Some people hope that Maxon will do it. That would be nice. Here's hoping.
This disclaimer ist not necessary, since you've proven it with the rest of your posting.
Autodesk Flame, Nuke and custom coded shake are all competing nicely with After Effects in production houses.
MacMall (might) still has a few copies in stock, and I rushed over there to order my copy. I was planning on ordering it next month so it would show up on a different month's bill.
I had bought a few books this past month on digital compositing AND Shake, so it behooved me to order this before I couldn't.
I'm still awaiting confirmation of product availability for shipping. Hope I'm not too late ...
UPDATE 1 (6:15): Had to call MacMall to verify my order number; once I did, they released the product to FedEx (overnight delivery).
I had bought a few books this past month on digital compositing AND Shake, so it behooved me to order this before I couldn't.
I'm still awaiting confirmation of product availability for shipping. Hope I'm not too late ...
UPDATE 1 (6:15): Had to call MacMall to verify my order number; once I did, they released the product to FedEx (overnight delivery).
This is why you came to the conclusion that you did. The reality is that it is a small market and perception is everything. Shake was the first application in twenty years that gave production people, that make buying decisions, the notion that Apple could make serious inroads into high-end film production applications development. If Apple kills Shake permanently it will adversely effect how Apple Pro Apps are perceived in a small market. Shake's utility isn't a redundant, and Apple can't force or coerce compositors to use an app that doesn't have an effective interface for compositing when other apps that do exist.
I'm glad you can "totally" understand Apple, but they screwed up. The high-end compositing market was not overfilled at the time, with Shake ruling the roost, Nuke being used here and there, and a number of larger studios rolling their own comp software (which is how Shake and Nuke were born in the first place). Apple lost the trust of the VFX industry in one move.
I think you're still talking about competing with After Effects as a compositor, not as a half-compositor/half-animation app.
Animation is where After Effects blows actual compositing apps away in terms of functionality. The greatest ability of AE is to set hundreds of keyframes on hundreds of elements very quickly. It's very useful when you need a lot of things to make very specific movements, not just random preset behaviors. That's where it's very useful for some compositing situations and that's why, so far, it's indispensable to motion-graphics artists.
You know, when I started compositing 12 years ago, working on SGI/IRIX platforms, I thought the democratization of the tools would give people the ability to do whatever they want.
I thought when Apple bought Shake and made tremendous advances with the interface that it was the beginning of the end of Amateur Effects- that subcomping would be a thing of the past, that I wouldn't have to make 15 copies of a mask if I wanted to use it on more than one layer, that people would naturally abandon a compositor that didn't even have a real color corrector, and that more people would see that compositing was slathering poorly photoshopped layers with the Shine plug-in.
I feel like a photographer who, after a career of using an SLR finds himself expected to shoot with a disposable cardboard camera. The people I work with say "Depth of field? Manual focus? Exposure control? That seems too difficult."
I feel like a cook whose kitchen has been replaced with a bank of microwaves, surrounded by children who grin as they microwave Stouffer's frozen food, and think the being a chef is putting 3 prepackaged food items on one plate.
Thanks Apple. Thanks a bunch.
If you mean still alive then yes but features your dead wrong.
Thanks Ron for Bringing us Shake and NothingReal. Oh yeah and your great books on Digital Imaging and Compositing.
Off to the Nuke tut IBKgizmo today and some channel stuff. Should be fun.
sound logic
Nuke has great code, but the interface feels clumsy compared to Shake.
...One Hope
The only thing that I noticed is that there are a lot of things missing in this new roll out of FCS largely because Snow Leopard is not finished, so essentialy they just put it out in sync with a new hardware rollout to sell more hardware. My guess is that the major revision of FCS will happen after Snow Leopard is released. Maybe Apple, given a little more time, will reconsider a poor decision that's going to basically net them a whole lot of bad PR in the VFX/Film industry where they just started pushing through into a couple of years ago. Or, Apple is unwilling to sell the old Shake at this point since the next version is almost out of the pipeline.
The only thing that I noticed is that there are a lot of things missing in this new roll out of FCS largely because Snow Leopard is not finished, so essentialy they just put it out in sync with a new hardware rollout to sell more hardware. My guess is that the major revision of FCS will happen after Snow Leopard is released. Maybe Apple, given a little more time, will reconsider a poor decision that's going to basically net them a whole lot of bad PR in the VFX/Film industry where they just started pushing through into a couple of years ago. Or, Apple is unwilling to sell the old Shake at this point since the next version is almost out of the pipeline.
This is rough. I'm trying to explain the benefits of After Effects as an animation app to a bunch of compositing people. So, to make this simple, STOP comparing After Effects and Motion to Shake and Nuke already!!!
After Effects and Motion are ANIMATION apps with compositing abilities added in for convenience. Shake and Nuke are COMPOSITING apps with animation abilities added in for convenience. The abilities of the softwares bleed together somewhat, but comparing the two types of software as equal competitors is ridiculous.
If you are bemoaning the death of Shake because you now have to use After Effects, that just means there is no one developing actual compositing software at your price range anymore. But don't blame Adobe for that, blame Apple. They should be the ones selling Shake off so someone else can support it, especially if they have decided to exit the compositing market altogether.
After Effects and Motion are ANIMATION apps with compositing abilities added in for convenience. Shake and Nuke are COMPOSITING apps with animation abilities added in for convenience. The abilities of the softwares bleed together somewhat, but comparing the two types of software as equal competitors is ridiculous.
If you are bemoaning the death of Shake because you now have to use After Effects, that just means there is no one developing actual compositing software at your price range anymore. But don't blame Adobe for that, blame Apple. They should be the ones selling Shake off so someone else can support it, especially if they have decided to exit the compositing market altogether.
Fine. But here it's about Shake, not AE, so it's about compositors.
And still, AE is a pain in the... by the way, in german, "After" means anus
So an after effect would be... a fart? (There's an app for that)
Shake, Great tool. We knew it was going. Too bad. Hope remains that Apple may replace it with another pro ap. For now we must move forward. It is about the artist and not the tools. I did not ask the guy who added on to my house what kind of hammer he was using. Accept it and move forward. We have good work ahead of us. Leonardo had crappy paint brushes I bet.
Sad... By the looks of things, I don't think anything is going to come in its place from Apple.
I am pretty content with the FCS update, but I was a bit disappointed not to see any of the "Phenomenon" rumors come to fruition.
I guess Nuke will be the choice now. How much does it cost?
Can anyone tell me, if people choose to continue using Shake, how long will it be relevant in its current state before it is not worth using anymore?
I'm not going to miss Shake. Why? We still have it and use it.
Shake continues to be as useful today as the day we got our first seat of it. There are some things it does very, very well and that's not really going to change.
That being said, once you learn how Apple translated some of the technology to Motion, motion can do some things much more quickly and some other things much more effectively. I don't like that it's often resolution limited and that using expressions in motion (strangely) isn't as intuitive as Shake, but in many cases we can produce work much more quickly with motion.
We use both in a very small independent shop and will continue to do so. We can't afford the $3500US+$1000/year a nuke license costs, and frankly that money is better spent elsewhere (for us.)
Shake will still be our go-to app for affordable, reliable 2D compositing - especially when we get footage shot in haste (which seems to be a sad trend these days.)
Shake continues to be as useful today as the day we got our first seat of it. There are some things it does very, very well and that's not really going to change.
That being said, once you learn how Apple translated some of the technology to Motion, motion can do some things much more quickly and some other things much more effectively. I don't like that it's often resolution limited and that using expressions in motion (strangely) isn't as intuitive as Shake, but in many cases we can produce work much more quickly with motion.
We use both in a very small independent shop and will continue to do so. We can't afford the $3500US+$1000/year a nuke license costs, and frankly that money is better spent elsewhere (for us.)
Shake will still be our go-to app for affordable, reliable 2D compositing - especially when we get footage shot in haste (which seems to be a sad trend these days.)