Some people need to either a.) Know what they are talking about BEFORE start typing things that expose their extreme ignorance. or b.) Not make up things, because think they can and no one will call them for it.
This is one of those comments where the poster just has absolutely no idea and is guessing, posting his opinions or beliefs as fact. In post-production, processes outside of editing probably account for 80% of post costs just for the pure simple fact that even "non-FX" movies now utilize a wide assortment of compositor type post-production editing.
Fact:
I don't know whether Apple really has discontinued Shake, and no one else does either.
We're all working off of speculation that because Apple took down the US Shake pages and told resellers that they've discontinued producing Shake 4.1 or have run out of stock and aren't selling anymore copies that Shake is done. That could be the case and it could not be. As I've already said the timing of this happening days before the "Mecca" of VFX conventions opens seems peculiar. The other issue is that a great deal of the features that will be in Snow Leopard really only cater to high end graphics users. Who really needs a "Supercomputer" inside there computer outside of highend users? With so many VFX/compositing software developers now on the Mac it seems kind of foolish to not capitalize on the fact that first party apps would decidedly have major performance advantages in the marketplace. Siggraph opens TOMORROW, Apple could very well make a product announcement or a press release of a big acquisition at any point in the next couple of days.
Look, i could have taken issue with the people who said that After FX is never used for compositing and the others who said that Motion is, but I didn't, and if I had I'd like to think that I wouldn't have done it such an unnecessarily rude way. There are millions of people who work in post-production, and about half of them use macs, so why some ppl think they're the only ones gracing these forums with their presence, I have no idea. The fact is that high-end compositing for film is one the few things I know a lot about, since I do it for a living, mostly using Shake.
I, much like you guessing from your posts, don't know much about post-production outside of high-end applications. I don't even know much about post-production outside of film, except what I have gleaned from my colleagues that have moved around between advertising, promos, tv and film. I don't know much about video production beyond advertising, promos, tv and film, except what I have learnt from friends from school/uni who work making films for small targeted audiences (corporate etc.). What I do know is that the big facilities in London only ever hire as much as 1000 compositors at any one time, and the smaller facilities probably only account for as many as that again. So that's 2000 Shake licenses in one of the biggest vfx cities in the world; one of the few cities in the world with much of a vfx industry at all. A city, unlike the US centres and Australia, where other packages like After FX, Nuke, Toxic and Fusion were hardly used at all during Shake's peak. The VFX industry in the US is not going to be more than 100 times the size of that in London, and the minor players like Vancouver, Weta, Australia and the rest of the world aren't going to be 10 times bigger than the UK between them.
So that's around 222,000 workstations between all the film, commercial and promo houses worldwide. Even if you double that number to account for in-house television teams, one-off offices set up for in-house production teams, enthusiasts, freelancers that actually pay for their own licenses for their own kit (there aren't many) and self-reliant filmmakers comping shots themselves, you still have less than a third as many potential Shake users as there are REGISTERED final cut users.
If I was to bother telling people they needed to get their facts right before posting, the way you did to me, I would have to spend an awful lot of time telling argumentative ppl like you things like:
1) The person who cuts a major production isn't the only person who needs a licensed copy of Avid/FCP on the production. If there are any VFX, every separate VFX house will have a VFX editor for the show, and there will be other editing staff besides. IMDB a major film's crew and search for the word editor. It comes up a lot, and not just under sound.
2) 3D tracking software will always be one step ahead of compositing packages, and will always constitute a market sector of its own, even if compositing packages eventually come to incorporate plug-ins the way AE has mocha's planar tracker.
3) Nobody does their final grade in Shake or any other compositing software. They use Colour or most likely do it in the DI. All compositors have to do is match reference plates or keep it neutral by not playing with the grade too much.
4) 2D animation is not exactly a growth industry and still doesn't call for much compositing.
5) Title animation still falls broadly under the category motion graphics, and so is mainly done using After FX, even when the titles are comp-heavy, since After FX covers both fields admirably. Apple, meanwhile, decided long ago that each discipline required a separate tool and very few compositors I know have ever comped a shot for a credit sequence, so it makes up only a tiny fraction of the work done by us.
More than that, there's the fact that most people simply don't understand what I do for a living, even if they know quite a lot about film. They all describe me as an editor, and the only way they get what I mean is if I say I photoshop film. They have often heard of Shake but don't know what it is. FCP has entered the common consciousness by making NLE reach a broader audience of amateurs editing holiday videos and whatnot, semi-pro videographers who can afford to buy licenses but have NO CALL WHATSOEVER for compositing. For every VFX-laden blockbuster requiring more than the 5 comp artists it takes to wrap up a period drama, there will be 10000 corporate videos and wedding movies. And, whilst compositing is becoming ever more widely used and practiced, it is worth noting that even though the iLife suite features heavily watered-down versions of Logic, FCP and Aperture, there is no iComp software.
Despite all that, I agree with you, Ron Brinkmann probably has equity in the Foundry anyways, and his twitter feed probably isn't the most reliable source. Apple may have had something waiting in the wings. I personally feel its more likely to be a low-end compositing package to join the suite in one of the next revisions, but I wouldn't rule out a surprise announcement tomorrow altogether. But it does seem awfully unlikely.
