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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.
You forgot to put in the end tag! Now all of the following posts will be karma whores.
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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?
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.
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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.
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.