Katie MarsalAlthough the official Web site for Shake was still online early Thursday afternoon, it was later changed to forward to the page for Final Cut Studio. MacRumors received word that Apple sales representatives were informed that the product was discontinued.
The current release, Shake 4.1, debuted in 2006. A minor update, bringing it to 4.1.1, came out in 2008. As an extension for Final Cut Studio, the software was been the tool of choice for major motion-picture studios and leading effects houses to create award-winning visual effects including Peter Jackson's "King Kong."
The $499 software worked in tandem with the Final Cut Studio. Last week, Apple updated that suite and lowered the price to $999. More than 100 new features were added to the latest Final Cut, perhaps negating the need for Shake entirely.
Rumors that Shake would be discontinued first began to swirl 2006, when the project called "Phenomenon" was believed to be in Apple's future plans. It was not long after the release of Shake 4.1 that Apple informed customers it would no longer be selling maintenance for Shake as "no further updates" to the application were planned. The company also slashed the price of the software by 80 percent, down from $2,999 to $499.
Rumors at the time suggested Phenomenon would be based heavily on the codebase for Motion, Apple's professional graphics animation software.
Apple did not yet officially confirm the discontinuation of Shake Thursday.
Wesley Hilliard
AppleInsider Staff
Andrew Orr
Amber Neely
William Gallagher
51 Comments
Apple employees maintain that Motion is superior to Shake. I find Shake's interface to be much more efficient and intuitive.
I expect Shake to become integrated into a future version of Motion to improve production efficiency.
Aw, man. As difficult as Shake was to pick up, it's a ridiculously powerful tool, and I actually enjoyed learning and using it it. I'm kinda sad to see it discontinued.
It seems so. The Shake link now redirects to the Final Cut Studio page.
http://www.apple.com/shake/
http://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/...mpositing.html
Hopefully they've fixed the interface hang-ups and various other bugs like motion blur applying to everything including opacity. I love the hardware-acceleration in Motion but layer-based editors are rubbish for keying. Even if they'd allow node-based editing for just that.
Parameter linking is nice in 4 - hope that means proper expressions and not just basic linking. Behaviors aren't powerful enough.
All is not lost regarding Shake, at least the original developers had the sense to move to The Foundry and work on Nuke and take their innovation there so that their creativity will live on instead of dying in Apple's hands.
I suppose they had to take Motion back to basics in order to build it the way they wanted but deleting Shake from memory isn't the way to make Motion better.
Comparing Motion to Shake is laughable - Motion is not even the equal, yet, of After Effects, existing as a quicker, simpler piece of software. CS4 also now apes many of the GUI improvements of Motion, whilst still delivering a better result - anyone who argues differently doesn't use both, or use them for a living.
Shake was a node based compositor - that's the major difference between it and even AE. You could reach into layers in Shake far more easily to isolate and alter comps. That's why newer software like Nuke is node based, along with the likes of Flame, Inferno etc.
If Apple has discontinued it (it's still listed in the UK store) I'm not suprised, but saddened to see them move away from their only fully-pro post software. As software like this is unlikely ever to sell a million copies, I think there's a very slim chance Apple will ever release something like this in the future.