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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.
From the website (never heard of it before) It appears to be a professional video compositing program. They said it was used in many major motion pictures, and had a story about its use in Ice Age.
The price difference between the linux/windows version and the OS X version is about $5000. You can buy one really nice new pimped out pro mac with that kind of money. My guess is they are tempting current shake users to make the "switch"
/bin/fortune | slashdotsig.sh
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.
thanks. useful. (i'm your parent)
Taking a look at the tech specs for Shake, reveals that a 3 button mouse is required on the Mac platform... now where can I find one of those on the Apple store? ;-)
You forgot to put in the end tag! Now all of the following posts will be karma whores.
</whore>
Whew!
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
*Shake 2.5 for Windows is available to existing Shake 2.46 Windows customers only.
Makes you wonder how long the Windows version will be around?
And I woulda got away with it, too, if it hadn't been for those nosy kids!
Bwa-ha-ha.
Mac OS X 10.2 will be required, so add $120 to the cost of each license, too.
That would be $129, plus tax where applicable.
What Would the Fab Five Do?
but to me apple is starting to look like they are buying out all the competition of the film industry little by little and isn't that a monoply? correct me if I am wrong. I love apple, kick ass products but with their making you pay for .mac and the such seems like apple is getting a little to greedy.
--
If we don't end war, War will end us. - H.G. Wells
Apple better be going after the market....
"Minority Report" Mobile Editing Studio Uses Dell
Excerpt:
Dell Precision Workstations and Other Dell Equipment Saved Production Crew Valuable Time and Money
Dell played a major role in creating "Minority Report," an action thriller directed by Steven Spielberg. It is set in Washington in the year 2054 and takes place in a world where the police have developed a psychic technology to arrest and convict murderers before they commit their crimes. Detective John Anderton, head of this "pre-crime" unit, finds himself accused of a murder he hasn't yet committed.
The futuristic nature of the film, based on the story by famed science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, required the actors to interact with virtual objects. The crew needed a fast way to create these complex effects in real time to ensure they would fit precisely with what the actors were doing on screen.
Dell equipment used by the "Minority Report" production crew helped accomplish this difficult task. The solution was to rent a 47-foot trailer and equip it with the latest Dell computer hardware to capture, monitor and edit video in real-time on the set.
The production team installed six Dell PrecisionTM workstations and 10 Dell OptiPlexTM desktops, all with flat panel monitors to save valuable real estate inside the trailer. The systems were loaded with Adobe® Photoshop® , Adobe Premiere® and Macromedia® Director® Shockwave® Studio. Each Dell Precision workstation was configured with a dual 36GB SCSI RAID setup, an IEEE 1394 card and 512MB RDRAM to play back the uncompressed video in full motion as it was streaming in from the set.
The crew used Dell InspironTM laptops for real-time monitoring and for distributing pre-compressed digital information. They also built a complete communication system to stay in contact with the set. This enabled the crew to take this mobile editing setup to the different locations during production.
"Our goal on the set was to create the technical environment that gives maximum flexibility to the actors and the director; it was up to us to work to their rhythm, not the other way around," said Bonnie Curtis, producer, "Minority Report." "Set and talent time are very expensive and the last thing the director wants to hear is 'hold on.' Fortunately, we never had to say those words."
"We saved a 'man-month' of labor at each location because we didn't have to rebuild, reconfigure and rewire every time, not to mention how much we saved by choosing standards-based hardware," said Matthew Morrissey, the film's playback supervisor.
The hardware performed flawlessly," added Morrissey. We needed wicked-fast equipment, huge amounts of storage and great support. Dell delivered."
Dell's involvement with "Minority Report" is both an example of the value Dell delivers to the film industry and a demonstration of how Dell solutions can actually reduce a customer's cost of doing business by utilizing standards-based hardware.
Next time, try reading about the product.
quoted from http://www.apple.com/shake/
"Resolution Independence and Extensibility
Shake simultaneously handles 8, 16 and 32-bit (float) images for the highest-quality productions in the industry. Its scanline/tiled-based renderer provides efficient processing of the most complex projects and features an almost unlimited number of layers, custom macros, concatenation of contiguous color and transformation processes for better quality and render times, an extensive scripting language and distributed rendering for larger projects."
So if you're not rendering fast enough, you can render to server farm easily enough and solve your issue rather quickly. After all, what else are you going to do with your old PC hardware?
except that you opened a nested whore tag before you closed his, so there's still one open.
</comment>
</whore>
Just keep wishing and hoping and praying.
Lets see, an 800MHz G4 is only, what, 24 times as fast as a 500MHz P3 when doing floating point math.
Its funny- PC people still think their processors cant' do fractions..... and they're right!
At least, not very fast.
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
Ah, but the comment is currently at +2, so obviously I was whoring. :-) (Is there a down-mod for using a smiley???)
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
Some poor reader probably reads at a threshold of four, so until you get one more point that whore comment is going to remain opened for them.
Don't worry, i've got it taken care of:
Think about it: somebody who wants to get into computer music can buy a PC and pay $$$ for Cubase or get a Mac and a deeply discounted copy of Logic.
This is a brilliant way for Apple to even out the costs of pro solutions without lowering the price of their CPUs.
Now that Apple's offering a higher-end software that can compete against some of the bigger players, I wonder if they'll be offering some type of demo. Many of the others like Discreet who sell compositing software--especially the one's you usually purchase through a distributor or licensed reseller--will gladly give in-house demos of their hardware or software to try and lure new business. An artist will usually want to feel comfortable with a toolset before plunking down the purchase price.
I hope this happens in some form...whether via Apple or via the retailers. It'd show a solid desire to grow this market, and boost Shake's appeal to those who are looking for something similar to Combustion (and to some extend After Effects) but with full OS X support.
-Barkeep, a draft of your most hazardous brew, for the world is slowly stepping into focus, and I don't like what I see.
I guess they have the Mac CPU doing some of the work that is left for the high-end PC graphics card to do, since the market is pretty scarce for Mac workstation-class graphic cards.
This is not a troll - I'm just wondering if it's a good idea for Apple to post requirements like this, which I took directly from their Shake specs page, when Apple has for so long been touting the "Megahertz Myth".
Renders take twice as long so it should cost half as much.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
In case you didn't know, the <whore> tag is related to the 'Content-Moderation' MIME header. There are plans to include it in CSS4, but because of implementation issues, it will probably be an optional component. Browsers will have the choice to skip past any items below a fixed value without displaying them.
I don't think Apple is going to start making 3 button mice. First, there are already plenty of quality ones out there. Second, it might set a precedent that some Mac software requires a 3 button mouse. For power users, it's ok, but for regular users, it makes a lot more sense to have one button. I am guessing this is a case where three mouse buttons are needed, but I am guessing they will try to avoid that situation unless they have to.
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