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Apple Releases Shake 4.1, Drops Price To $499
chasingporsches writes "Today, Apple released the long-awaited Universal Binary version of Shake, their high-end compositing application. Its new version is 4.1 and is available from their online store or as a crossgrade from version 4.0 for $49. The price of Shake has been dropped significantly, from $2999 to $499. (Educational version is $249.) The minimum system requirements imply that this could run on any new Mac, including the iMac, Mac mini, MacBook Pro, and MacBook, as well as older PowerPC-based Macs."
Linux
* 1GHz (or faster) Pentium III, Pentium 4, or AMD Athlon processor or faster
* Fedora Core 4
* 512MB (or more) of RAM
* 1GB hard disk space for disk cache
* Workstation-class graphics card, such as NVIDIA Quadro2 or Quadro4
* Display with 1280-by-1024-pixel resolution and 24-bit color
* Three-button mouse
Well, it runs on Fedora Core 4, but whatever.
Display with 1280-by-1024-pixel resolution and 24-bit color
MacBook doesn't have that.
Sig Nature
You should see the EDA software we sell... $2million list price for CAD software to design chips.
And yet, there are very few pirates.
Apple will no longer be selling maintenance for Shake and no further
software updates are planned as we begin work on the next generation of
Shake compositing software. While we're excited about the innovations we can
bring in the future, we understand you have a business to run today that
requires Shake. To that end, we will provide all Maintenance customers with
the following three options:
A. Customers can continue with end-user e-mail support, as well as SDK
support for the duration of their Maintenance contract.
B. Customers may elect to cancel their Maintenance and receive a pro-rated
refund for the unused portion. Existing software licenses would continue to
function according to the Software License Agreement. Maintenance customers
that wish to cancel their contract must do so by July 23, 2006.
C. Additionally, Maintenance customers may choose to license the Shake 4.1
Source Code for $50,000. The Source Code license includes a 5,000 seat
volume license of Shake 4.1. This offer is designed to help facilities with
significant Shake investments maintain a reliable and controllable visual
effects pipeline. Maintenance customers that wish to license the Shake 4.1
Source Code must do so by July 23, 2006. Apple reserves the right to refuse
any maintenance customer source Code access.
I like shake, but it's never really fit in amongst the other Apple apps. But to EOL it for their (rumored) own app seems short-sighted. It's more likely people will migrate to Nuke in the meantime, which has jumped ahead while Apple has mostly let shake wither on the vine.
A year since version 4, and we've got bug-fixes and an universal binary. Whee.
-b
From what I hear their biggest market is Shake on Linux, now a standard production platform in the feature film industry. I wonder if this is due to 64 bit systems being the favourite of big production houses, or whether it's because Linux is also more widely used in 3D animation and rendering roles. King Kong (pictured on the Apple site) was almost entirely made on Red Hat Linux machines running on IBM workstations AFAIK.
Two, actually - once you check the correct box in System Preferences, put two fingers on the trackpad and click the button to simulate a right click.
I've heard good things about version five of Digital Fusion. Sorry, don't know about Toxik either. Autodesk's entry into the vfx industry is interesting...they've bought a lot of good stuff, but I'm not so sure that sticking them all together is going to work quite so smoothly as they would hope. That's my theory that that's where Apple is ultimately aimed with all this, a shake/discreet/ae + san fcp-integrated beast. They've got the people, and if they're not working on shake (or motion) then here's hoping they're trying to make our lives easier.
-b
iBooks for awhile now (memory says since late 2004, I could be off) have had trackpads that supported scrolling. Using iScroll 2, you can enable the two-fingered-right-click, along with good customization of the scrolling.