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Student version of Shake?

P-Worm

P-Worm

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Jul 16, 2002
2,045
1
Salt Lake City, UT
I was walking through my campus bookstore and I saw that they have Shake for an amazing $250. This program used to be almost $10,000! Now I don't do film, or even HD right now. Video editing and special effects is just a strong hobby of mine. I think that $250 is more than reasonable for a piece of software so advanced and Christmas is right around the corner.

So my question is, would it be worth it to get Shake when I mostly just use a miniDV camera? Or is this program way out of my league? If it means anything, I don't have any compositing program right now, not even After Effects. What do you think?

P-Worm
 
Shake is a difficult program to learn. But if you are willing to put some time in and pick up a good tutorial book, then you can get a lot out of the software. I just ordered the Apple Pro Training book for Shake...should get it on Monday. I'll let you know how it is (I've heard very good things).
 
Shake is an insane program Since it's just 250 for Students I wouldn't call it overkill but it has a steep leaning Curve The manual is 1000 Or so pages long. :eek:
 
motion or after effects will also offer some compositing features, look up feature sets and see what suits your needs best
 
i'd say if you have the money to spare, go for it.. there are some great books to use to learn it (that are far, far more informative than the manual), and it can (as you've probably seen) produce some excellent results.
 
I have just got a copy of shake-well worth it. The manual is MASSIVE but out of all the apple manuals I have (Logic 7, Final Cut Studio, Motion) it is by far the easiest to follow-with very good introductory tutorials.

Would recomend it to anyone interested in visual work.
 
i'm a shake compositor and i would say once you start understanding what the program is doing, you'll know how to use it better. its not really a button clicking program like photoshop or after effects. what you end up with at the end of your composite is a tree of operations that you've applied to your images instead of a mess of layers. definitely pick up the apple pro training series manual by marco paolini and i would highly recommend picking up the art and science of digital compositing by ron brinkmann (one of the original creators of shake). i would spring for the full version for only a few hundred bucks more cause then you can legally use it to make $$$. though shake is an end of lifecycle product, its still a powerful program and a great introduction to the node based compositing methodology used in other popular apps such as digital fusion and nuke. if compositing is something youre thinking about seriously getting into, i would highly recommend starting out with shake.
 
I am definetely considering a purchase of Shake. This is a huge tool for an editor, and I know I can expand my work just by learning how to use an App as powerful as Shake. I'm shocked how the price of this program has gone down so dramatically.
 
techster85 said:
didn't the normal price for shake go WAY down last year? so 250 is still a great price, but how far off of the regular price is it?
Click to expand...

Well it started out at nearly $10,000. The price drop to $500 and $250 student was from $3000. That's quite the savings.

I ended up getting the program and I'm going to through the tutorials now. This program is a monster! There are so many filters and various node types, I don't know how you could ever learn them all. I can also see why development stopped on this. It doesn't have the signature Apple ease of use, it's just incredibly powerful. At times it feels like I am running this program from a UNIX command line.

What I've seen that it can do is mighty impressive. The keying filters for green or blue screen give you a lot of control and the program can 'figure out' a lot of settings for you. I put this in the must by list.

P-Worm
 
wow, iHope iCan get shake for that price... I can only find it for 450 at the moment. where you do you go to school?!?!?!

and isn's shake for linux almost $5,000?
 
I go to the University of Utah. Did you check the Apple Store for education? you should be getting the same price? :confused:

And you are correct, Shake for Linux if $5000

P-Worm
 
Do you guys really think it worth learning a program thats no longer supported? I was offered the chance to get full Apple train and cerified. But i didn't see the point.
 
P-Worm said:
So my question is, would it be worth it to get Shake when I mostly just use a miniDV camera? Or is this program way out of my league? If it means anything, I don't have any compositing program right now, not even After Effects. What do you think?

P-Worm
Click to expand...

You CAN make HD videos with mini DV materials. If you are going to be doing a lot of compositing. I've been wanting to do a project where I use my DSLR to shoot stills and my mini DV cam for picture in picture video.

Once a long time ago I made a show that used four projectors. Two for 8mm movie film and two for 35mm slides. It was really just a film making exercise. It was a slow chase where the "bad guy" was walking slowly and the girl getting chased kept looking back and running, falling down, ripping her dress and panicking but this guy kept waling at a slow steady pace and gaining on her. We showed multiple views some moving some stills, some in cross processed E6 slides, some in IR. This kind on unconventional show keeps the viewer's interest because there is a lot going on. The plot was quite thin - "The Tuurtle and The Hair" story remake.

So think up a project that you can shoot in SD and DSLR and animation.
 
lorductape said:
wow, iHope iCan get shake for that price... I can only find it for 450 at the moment. where you do you go to school?!?!?!

and isn's shake for linux almost $5,000?
Click to expand...

Shake is listed on the Apple.com web site for $249. All day every day the same $249 price.
Just go to the education store on the Apple web site. You will need to enter your school name.

Should you buy it? It's silly to buy something just because you can. The only reason to buy is because you have a project that needs it
 
Rokem said:
Shake is an insane program Since it's just 250 for Students I wouldn't call it overkill but it has a steep leaning Curve The manual is 1000 Or so pages long. :eek:
Click to expand...

The manual for Final Cut Express is about 1150 pages and that does not include the 300+ pages for Soundtrack and Livetype. So you can't simply count pages. FCE is likely not as complex as Shake even if the manuals ar the same size.
 
amazon.com sells it for $399, for the full retail version - for those of you that want to save an extra 100 Dollars. That's really close to the price for the student version, if you ask me.

- Martin
 
Well, I bought it and it should be coming in a few days. I'm looking forward to learning this application.

It is so sophisticated, but with time you can expand your skills and value as an editor.
 
I just got finished with the first few lessons in the apple pro training series book for shake.

I gotta say that I now love this program. I'm going to try to do everything in shake now and only use after effects for very simple things. I was a little unsure if I'd get used to the node based compositing, but it is awesome.
 
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