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Shake 2.5 for Mac OS X Half Off
dtype writes "Now we can begin to see where some of Apple's latest purchases are heading. Shake 2.5 for Mac OS X was
announced today. It is notable that the Mac OS X version costs half as much as versions for other operating systems, and that current customers have the option of doubling their current number of licenses at no cost by migrating to Mac OS X." Mac OS X 10.2 will be required, so add $120 to the cost of each license, too. It's still a bargain at just over $5,000, though.
Shake is a compositor. It's kind of like Photoshop at 24 frames per second. Kind of.
You start with a collection of images or sequences of images; these may come from any number of sources, but they usually come from a special type of scanner called a ``datacine'' (or ``telecine,'' if you're old-fashioned). When you scan film, each frame is stored on disk as a separate image file (usually in DPX or Cineon format) and given a number, so you end up with nastytroll.0001.dpx through nastytroll.0048.dpx.
You import these sequences-- and other elements, like stills-- into Shake, where you can do things like key out the background behind this green-screen shot and put the result on top of that background plate, and add that character who was also shot on a green-screen, but paint out the wires holding him up and add a glow around his shoes, then add some CG spaceships and stuff (provided as sequences by the animation group) to the background.
Once you do all that artistic stuff, you end up with a result, which gets rendered out into a (you guessed it) sequence of images. That sequence can then be used with other software, or it can be printed to film using a laser film printer.
That's basically what Shake does, in a nutshell.
Oh, and they used it on movies like Fight Club, The Matrix, and LOTR.