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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.
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.
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? ;-)
Right here. There are several available.
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
Okay, you and I posted exactly the same thing at exactly the same time. That's just plain creepy.
Right here. There's a whole page full of mice from Kensington and Microsoft, not to mention tablets from Wacom, which is probably what you really want if you're into this kind of thing.
___
Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
*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.
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?
First of all, I think you need to look up the words ``competition'' and ``monopoly.'' I do not think they mean what you think they mean.
.mac goes, I for one would rather see Apple stay solvent and profitable (I'm a shareholder). They were losing money big-time on iTools, because it was far more popular than they expected it to be. It was either turn it into a for-pay service, or dump it entirely. I agree completely that the current situation isn't wonderful, but I consider it the lesser of two evils.
Apple's competition is Dell, IBM, and other makers of Windows PCs, and to a much lesser extent, SGI and other makers of Unix workstations. Nothing Real isn't Apple's competition.
And a monopoly is a situation in which only one source exists for a class of product or service. It's not meaningful to talk of monopolies on single products. You could say that Apple now has a monopoly on Shake... but that would be a meaningless statement. If every other compositor-- including things like After Effects and, hell, Photoshop and Microsoft Paint-- ceased to exist, then Apple would have a monopoly on compositing tools. But that's not the case, and it's not bloody likely to happen.
And as far as
except that you opened a nested whore tag before you closed his, so there's still one open.
</comment>
</whore>
Which is bullshit-- someone who's just switched platforms doesn't have to buy the OS-- they get it ON THEIR BOX.
Sheesh. Shake 2.5 won't be out before 10.2- as 10.2 IS REQUIRED to run it. so anyone making the switch will get their box with 10.2 on it.
Hell, they'll probably order the whole kit and kaboodle from apple pre-installed with shake and jaguar.
Why this constant harping on Apple as if its expensive-- its only expensive if you don't value your time (and even then, its cheaper than the windows alternative.)
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
This reminds me of something funny-and-true I read a while back. Only one software tool has been used on every feature film since the advent of digital production. It's the single most popular tool in Hollywood. And the name of that tool is... vi.
In other words, no matter who you are or what you do, you can find somebody who has used your product in making their film. Remember last winter when everybody and their sister was bragging about how Weta used their software or hardware or whatever to make LOTR? That's because Weta used one of everything to make LOTR.
That said, the bit about using ``1384'' (i.e., FireWire) to capture uncompressed video sounds fishy to me. Although lord knows the bandwidth is there-- uncompressed serial digital video only needs 270 Mbps, while FireWire can handle up to 400-- I've never heard of anybody using FireWire for that yet. I'll bet the Dell boxes were capturing DV-compressed video at 25 Mbps over FireWire, just like you get out of your camcorder at home. No facts here, just an educated guess on my part.
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
Apple has had the advantage in video ever since Amiga died. There are a lot of video hardware manufacturers that only make hardware for Mac because the QuickTime framework makes it so easy to do so.
That said, though, I think that this move with Shake is an indication that Apple is coming to the realization that it may not matter given the fact that Apple is currently losing the hardware race.
I'm not writing Apple off, but I think it's time to recognize that IBM/Motorola aren't supporting them. PPC, despite being superior on a clock-for-clock basis, is now so far behind on clock speed that said superiority is no longer enough. My advice would be to start porting OS X to a 64-bit arch now. Naturally, I'd love to see OS X on Hammer, and it seems like that is the more likely choice, but considering that Apple has no legacy x86 code to support, maybe Itanium would be a better choice for them?
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
You're under the mistaken impression that people buy Macs because Macs are fast, therefore the fact that Macs aren't as fast as PCs means more people will buy PCs. That's wrong.
People buy Macs so that they (the people, not the computers) will be productive. I have a 750 MHz PIII on my desk (using it now) and a 500 MHz iBook. Right now, I'm using the PC to surf and goof off, but in a minute I'm going to go back to using Illustrator and InDesign on my iBook. It's not that my iBook is faster, and it's not that I'm using software that's not available on Windows. It's that I'm more productive when I'm using a Mac. Lots and lots of people feel the same way; even if it's only 5-10% of the desktop computer market, it's still millions of people.
Bottom line: fast is nice and all, but there are things that are more important than fast. That's where Apple's market share comes from.
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
Opteron == Hammer
Opteron is the product name for the core which has been refered to as Hammer for the last year or so.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Did you read the article I linked. Are you honestly suggesting that a 50% performance hit doesn't adversely affect productivity?
For general office work and such, you're right, it isn't going to matter that much. For Photoshop and AfterEffects, commonly used apps in fields traditionally dominated by Macs, it obviously will make a difference.
That you feel more productive in the environment you are most familiar working in is something I can't argue with, but perhaps you should ask yourself how much of that productivity increase is simply due to familiarity?
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Let's get back to the subject at hand: we're talking about Shake here. If you're using Shake, you send jobs to the render farm to render; you don't use your desktop for that. This is true no matter what your desktop system is. So the only performance question revolves around interactivity: is the computer fast enough for you to interact creatively with the software? I played with Shake running on a dual-processor G4 at NAB, and it was very interactive. So the answer to that question is a qualified yes.
I could put a dozen 2 GHz Pentium-whatevers on my desk, but they'd just spend most of their time waiting on me. The heavy lifting is being done by the render farm in the basement.
So yup, I'm suggesting that a 50% speed difference between a Mac and a PC doesn't mean jack shit, as long as both PC and Mac are fast enough for the artist.
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.
They were losing money big-time on iTools, because it was far more popular than they expected it to be.
Fortunately, the $100 charge will take care of Apple's popularity problem.
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.
Every once in a while I like to masturbate a new word into my vocabulary, even if I don't know what it means.
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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