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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 was always hoping/suspecting that Phenomenon will simply be Motion 4. And now I am afraid it is so...

I guess Nuke will be the choice now. How much does it cost?
$3.5k + $1k/year maintenance. AFAIR about the price category Shake used to be.
 
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 :D So an after effect would be... a fart? (There's an app for that)

Nice iPhone reference there. :cool: Well, now that we're back to compositors, I really do think Apple should sell off Shake. I mean, that's how they acquired it. That's how they acquired almost everything in FCS too. It would be a nice gesture of them to just let go of the things they are no longer interested in, instead of burying them in some Apple graveyard....

(Yeah, AE is a pain. It's less of a pain for me because it's my primary program, but I do wish they would really work on the core logic of the program rather than crappy new features. Many of those I work with would like an uber-folder-comp-layer, where you twirl down precomps and all the layers from the precomps and their properties are right there. So really you wouldn't have to actually precomp things anymore, just group them into folders correctly. That way everything can live in one timeline. Adobe is actually very aware of this uber-precomp thing, because the person behind the idea has been heavily integrated with the AE team. That's just one of many things that would really help. A node system would be nice, but good luck trying to figure out how to make nodes and layers truly happy together. And there are plenty of node-based programs, so I wouldn't want AE to give up layers for nodes.)
 
It's funny how someone who, in the same post, admits he knows nothing about "the business", also claims to know the difference between color-grading, editing and visual-effects compositing, based on marketing hype on Apple's website.

Of what relevancy are positive testimonials by "colorists" and Walter Murch in regards to visual effects applications? The answer is: ZERO relevancy. Colorists have little to nothing to do with compositing, other than grading the final composited shots. And Walter Murch is a video and sound editor. These people are not VFX compositors.

Shake is not irreplaceable by a long shot. But what is clearly obvious by anyone who is a user of Final Cut Studio is that there is *nothing* in FCS that can replace the capabilities of Shake.
Dude, at least I'm up front about not being in the business but why do you keep on being such a poser? Who do you work with?

I posted a link showing Motion having compositing functionality. People who have Shake and prefer it can continue using it until an OS update breaks functionality. Just because it has been discontinued, it does not self destruct. Also, the testimonials did not just involve that color app but the entire suite.

I don't have the time or energy to google enough to match your poser skills.
 
...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.

Great point. Now you just have to go to every single post-production house in NYC and tell them that. Everytime I see someone trying to rotoscope in AFX, I have to heave a sigh.

Maybe people will go back to using Flame. Heh.
 
Dude, at least I'm up front about not being in the business but why do you keep on being such a poser? Who do you work with?

Don't take it personally, you were speaking about something that you admittedly don't work with, and you were incorrect. Not a big deal.
 
DVD Studio Pro in coming next. There have been no real updates for a half decade and the product is vastly inadequate for DVD production. This is a problem because Apple remains with no real product for DVD authoring.

Hope not. When I heard about that I thought of the latest version of iDVD, or lack thereof. Which hardly got a sniff of an update.

So what gives? This is three programs in six months, one of which Apple has tossed aside that are not getting attention.
 
its a long shot...

maybe Apple will be releasing "Phenomenon" (or maybe it should be renamed "mystery") soon...or maybe not

DVD Studio Pro will not get refresh until the whole blu-ray issue is resolved...
 
Finally, this is my solution to Apple... SELL ALL YOUR FREAKIN' PRO APPS TO A DEVELOPER WHO CARES ABOUT THEM!!! I'm tired of companies like Microsoft and Apple venturing into other markets, making great products, and then seemingly abandoning them. Someone else would care about FCP and Motion and Color and DVDSP and Blu-ray integration to keep innovating in this market, but Apple is on to other things. The end.

As I said before, Macintosh should be renamed in to MACINTOYS. They only seem to care about a new shiny redundant phone and making waves about a tablet.
 
Great point. Now you just have to go to every single post-production house in NYC and tell them that. Everytime I see someone trying to rotoscope in AFX, I have to heave a sigh.

Maybe people will go back to using Flame. Heh.

Yeah, I've been guilty of that. It's a good thing CS4 comes with Motor. Hopefully people will learn it. A big problem, I think, comes with education, possibly the motivation to self-educate. I studied film and graphic design to be a motion-graphics artist, but at my university there were no classes on compositing or its software. Except a small section in my After Effects class. After Effects was the only tool I knew (or had access to) when student-directors came around asking for FX (and boy howdy, did they!). So you hack with what you know. I wonder how often this happens. In Hollywood, they have dedicated houses for FX so you have to learn the real tools there, but when you're not at ILM, and FX is not the only thing you do, do you usually ever get the chance to even TRY real compositing software?
 
Oh wow

I am one who has used Shake almost daily from whenever, stable? yes, great compositor? yes, Mac like? NO! It is unlike any Apple app you might use, a maverick, a throw back. Better then AE? I don't care, I wouldn't know what AE can do that Shake can't, and long since Adobe killed Director I haven't spent a a single penny on Adobe. Shake has never let me down and is as complete a tool set as I need then and now as for the future I don't know, but perhaps not. That it has dropped off the line a Apple is not news - that has been know for years. Ironically that is one of the reasons I have become so attached to Shake, no over hyped absurd hysteria about why the latest sub version is better the the last, which after you have parted with a heap of cash is little more then a new start up screen. No the passing of shake won't be lamented by me - fingers crossed it runs and I suspect it will on 10.6 - in which case it will live on in my workflow
 
And to think that FCP could have almost become an Adobe product with the purchase of Macromedia. Yikes.

For what it's worth, when I was hired years ago to teach Motion, I was instructed that it wasn't meant to compete with After Effects, but was considered to be more of a motion graphics sketch-pad. I assume that has changed with the evolution of Motion, but yes, it's definitely no Shake.

I've made my living for the past 11 years with After Effects and I now consider it to be more of a motion graphics app than a compositor, per se. On the last feature I worked on, I did the opening titles in AE but turned over the Cineons to compositors to actually implement into the film. I just consider AE and Shake to be apples and oranges.
 
And to think that FCP could have almost become an Adobe product with the purchase of Macromedia. Yikes.

For what it's worth, when I was hired years ago to teach Motion, I was instructed that it wasn't meant to compete with After Effects, but was considered to be more of a motion graphics sketch-pad. I assume that has changed with the evolution of Motion, but yes, it's definitely no Shake.

I've made my living for the past 11 years with After Effects and I now consider it to be more of a motion graphics app than a compositor, per se. On the last feature I worked on, I did the opening titles in AE but turned over the Cineons to compositors to actually implement into the film. I just consider AE and Shake to be apples and oranges.

Huh. Nice to see where the workflow is there with titles and stuff. I also didn't remember where Final Cut came from.

Yeah, Apple began marketing Motion not as competition, but then they pulled AE from their retail stores and told me it was because AE was a competitor. It was strange to me, because Motion is not much as stand-alone product and always seemed an added bonus to FCS, not a primary reason to get it. Maybe FCS vs. the Adobe suites has something to do with it.
 
Motion is nowhere close to being a legitimate competitor to After Effects.

Motion is nothing but an editors helper, no one uses it for professional, high end motion graphics creation.

It's natural environment is the promo department of your local television station. ;)
 
I was always hoping/suspecting that Phenomenon will simply be Motion 4. And now I am afraid it is so...

Ya, but the update to Motion was pretty weak. In fact the updates in general were pretty weak I think. I was expecting new Cocoa interfaces and everything since they had to rewrite them anyway. Oh well! :eek:

$3.5k + $1k/year maintenance. AFAIR about the price category Shake used to be.

WOW, that hurts.
 
This is very disappointing news and it will no doubt hurt Apple's reputation in the movie industry. If they were going to discontinue this software why buy it in the first place?
 
RIP, Shake. Its very unfortunate Apple dropped this app for warmed-over plugins - Since it was so standalone, it probably could have just been shoved in FCS, IMO.

Actually, I think Aqua Teen got cancelled..sadly.

Maybe I'm late to the game on this, but that's more bad news for today.... :(
 
I can't be bothered to wade into this one.

Even comparing AE to Shake makes me weep.

3 pages and not one mention of Digital Fusion. Whilst Fusion and Nuke are the future you'll see Shake being used in production houses for another 3-4 years yet.

Amen. This is exactly what I thought. Shake is still king, but the industry will move to Fusion and Nuke. AE is an incredible motion graphics tool, but VERY few effects houses use it for compositing, and if they do, they're not doing effects-driven features. It's way too slow for that. Speaking from experience.

Guess my Apple Pro Certification in Shake 4 has started to lose its meaning.

PS anyone going to SIGGRAPH?
 
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