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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."
Shake is going mainstream (relatively speaking).
the more they over-think the plumbing the easier it is to stop up the pipe
Min Requirements say 1ghz cpu. Darn, this couldn't run on the Frozen CPU
There is no possible way to justify software costing 3 Grand. Even at 500 dollars, I will just go and download it on mininova.
Expensive software is exactly why people pirate stuff anyway. Why dont people learn this?
If you sell your stuff cheaper, people will actually BUY it.
Fascism is the greatest political ideology ever conceived. Sorry.
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.
The product's mascot?
It looks as though Apple is really going for the jugular in terms of wanting market share. The "old" Apple would have kept the price high and raked in the profits, the "new" Apple price hardware and software keenly (still with a slight premium if you don't want the h/w extras that come with a Mac), but still far cheaper than they used to be.
:-)
So Aperture got a price reduction, Shake has just dropped through the floor, and the machines are competitively priced... I was quoting "old" and "new" above because the guard hasn't really changed, but it seems the rules of engagement have been given a bit of a shake-up. I like the "new" Apple better, bodes well for things to come
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
heir high-end compositing application
Misread this as a composting application. I knew you mac boys like to think different, but my ten dollar garbage can, month old table scraps and watering can are more than enough for this type of job.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Why is Apple wasting development resources on the tiny number of people who bought their flaky Intel Macs?
Apple's market-share continues to slide lower and lower each quarter. Wasting time fiddling around with software for a niche segment of the tiny Mac market it silly.
Display with 1280-by-1024-pixel resolution and 24-bit color
MacBook doesn't have that.
Sig Nature
on the frozen PC's 500Ghz processor, 300Ghz at room temperature... quite a bit faster than the 1Ghz requirement. Emphasis added for clarity.
Another Trollaxor.com exclusive!
All Mac users, until recently, were destined for Hell. If you owned or used a Macintosh, you were getting a one-way ticket to Sheol free of charge. But thanks to Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple and Mac Messiah, the Mac community maintained their grace. The dark part of the story, however, is that Jobs himself is the one who put Mac users' souls in danger to begin for the sole purpose of market share. It was Steve's gamble that made Apple what it is today, but things weren't always so sunny. And it all began during Apple's Dark Ages.
A Deal with the Devil
December 20, 1996 was a date fateful not only for Apple but also for the souls of 25 million Mac users. At this point, Apple's next-generation operating system, Copland, had fizzled and Apple purchased NeXT for its OS. Mac users and the rest of the industry waited with eager ears for news. By August of that year, it was clear: Jobs had taken back his company and was simplifying everything, focusing on the G3 and pushing Mac OS 8 through while work on a new OS derived from OPENSTEP began. Jobs slashed many projects at Apple. But, as Apple's market share had fallen to 3.3%, Jobs began new projects in the shadows. And as 1997 drew to a close, he put one of them into motion.
After weeks of meticulous planning, Jobs called an emergency board meeting. As the board members arrived, Jobs drew a magic circle and muttered in Old Latin. In a ritual that CFO Fred Anderson described as scarier than losing a billion dollars in one quarter, Jobs had summoned the Devil. Many of the board fell ill and had to leave while Jobs and Satan haggled over the future of the company, but by the end of the meeting Steve presented a three-year plan to save Apple. After thanking Satan, he flew home in his private jet. Jobs would later have to replace most of the board, now demented or ill from their encounter with the prince of darkness, with his cronies from NeXT.
First Sprouts of the Demon Seed
The first and most obvious sign of something devilish was at MacWorld Boston later that Summer. Steve Jobs announced the departure of Gil Amelio, a new board of directors, and a $500 million deal with Microsoft that featured future Microsoft Office updates. It wasn't hard to believe the Devil was behind this deal. And many in attendance at the Boston MacWorld that year said they could make out distinctly goatish features in Bill Gates's face during his address to the audience. Little did the world know how close to the truth they were.
Several months later, Apple debuted the iMac. And it was a hit. The iMac revolutionized industrial design, got Apple's feet back in the consumer market, and most importantly garnered massive media attention. Indeed, the iMac became a thing to remember about 1998. Within another year the iBook and the Blue White Power Mac G3 debuted, which were also hits with their stylish looks. Satan and Jobs's plan was coming along nicely so soon and they looked ahead to newer, faster systems and in late '99 the seemingly impossible happened: Motorola had completed and released a new PowerPC core without the help of IBM.
Granted, the PowerPC G4 was just a revision of the G3, but it was groundbreaking at the time and gave Mac users a huge speed-boost and something to brag about to their Pentium II-using coworkers. But then Motorola stalled, even with the Devil working behind the scenes, and the G4 was stuck at 500 MHz for 18 months in what Mac users called The 500 MHz Fiasco. This in turned caused Apple's board to see a weakening in Satan's side of the bargain with Apple and they began to mull litigation against Satan for breach of contract.
Devil Inside
As the 500 MHz Fiasco loomed, Apple was hard at work renegotiating with Satan. Since Satan's efforts had flagged, Apple pushed
it does run on a 12" powerbook... cramped but usable...
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
It'll be interesting to see whether or not this will lure them into using Macs. Even though Apple have traditionally owned the graphic design and a large segment of the video editing market, they haven't made much of an inroad into movie visual effects where Windows and Linux dominate. This price drop might pay for half a workstation to it certainly lowers the risk for companies considering using Macs.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Am I the only one that thinks this is a bad idea?
Part of the requirement for being part of the elite is to *act* like a member of the elite. Don't apologize; indeed, you haven't. But if you want to graduate to the elite of the elite, you need to stop waving your elite membership card around. For that is what separates the truly elite from the merely elite; the truly elite, the super elite if you will, know it shows and have no need to impress their eliteness upon the lower classes.
Infuriate left and right
The iMac comes with a two button mouse with scroll button. The MacBook still has only a single button. Apple is confused.
Infuriate left and right
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
In what way has it jumped ahead? When I read the specs for Nuke I feel like I'm reading a copy of the specs for Shake.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
It's all very nice, but if I wanted to do some no-budget compositing, how do the alternatives compare?
The only free compositing packages I know of are Cinerella and Jahshaka - what's the difference between them and Shake?
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.
And to stay on topic, it's good to see more and more of apple's prices come out of the stratosphere. Now how about dropping that 20" cinema HD display to match dell's $400 on a similar screen.
Thanks jcr for the comment. Slashdot wouldn't be the same without you.
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Trolling?
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Ah, I missed that. At my last two companies we pushed Apple (and Nothing Real as it was then called) hard to support proxies properly because it was one of the most important features of any compositing system that we'd consider using. I think that might eliminate Nuke from the running for a lot of companies. But it is still a pity that Shake development has ground to a halt.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I would shit a big steaming turd on you apple fags but i fear you may enjoy it too much.
go fuck off and die you fucking pig fuckers.
Expensive software is exactly why people pirate stuff anyway. Why dont people learn this? If you sell your stuff cheaper, people will actually BUY it.
That is complete nonsense. People will pirate if they can do so easily. It is as simple as that. As you make piracy more complicated, sales rise. That is why there is a thriving successful industry offering software copy protection even though the security is easily defeated by a small number of more technically capable users. The latter are irrelevant.
An example. I once worked on commercial software that was bundled with a college textbook. It was well regarded software used in the industry. We were nice and didn't use copy protection. The academic version was US$15 with the coupon shrinkwrapped to the textbook. At numerous campus bookstores the software sales volume was 10% of the book despite being required for classwork. The next quarter we had an upgraded version and used one of the lowest cost software based security products available. The sales volume increased to 90% that of the book despite there being no shortage of crack programs. Sorry, but low price doesn't work, copy protection software does.
I'm all for lowering barriers to entry, and decent software at cheap prices is a great thing for the masses (many of whom learn on pirate copies anyway). But I doubt this move will be welcomed by the major studios.
It costs a lot of programmer time to develop decent software, especially complex apps like this. And the smaller your target market, the higher the cost per copy, simple as that. Basic economies of scale.
Now add to that the cost of in-depth technical support for each of your customers - not just installation problems or bug fixes, but answering usage questions, suggested techniques, basic training, occasional specialised plugin development, timely response to feature requests, rapid response to critical bugs, and the assurance that if the studio (who has committed their workflow to your product) ever has a show-stopping issue, you'll do whatever it takes to help them through it. THAT's what the high prices are for, and in my experience, most professional studios are more than happy to pay it.
Thus, we see Apple dropping all of that, as $500/copy simply can't cover the cost of supporting a complex and mission-critical app like that. The biggest studios may find it necessary to drop $50K on the source code to be able to fix bugs themselves, but not many would be willing to continue full development (not their business), and will doubtless be looking at phasing out Shake in favour of more actively-developed alternatives (most have been doing this for some time).
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Thanks for the tip. Didn't know it could do that.
Infuriate left and right
Read this post (also here). I quote: "Apple will no longer be selling maintenance for Shake and no further software updates are planned".
Apple will not be making the base product more stable, they're dropping it completely, in favour of some future product (apparently due around 2008). While the price drop will doubtless expand the market into the low end in the short term, the high-end users started their move away from Shake the moment Apple bought it (at least, those that wanted to keep running Linux and not Mac OS). Perhaps I didn't stress enough how important support is to high-end customers. Now the end of the road is clear, nobody is going to want to invest significantly in the Shake platform - including major plugin vendors.
I don't doubt Shake's technology will live on, but whatever Apple is working on will be a new product, and will not be released for Linux. Since something like 90% of Shake licences were Linux (which isn't even getting the price drop), most users will not see this as a good thing.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Still, it sounds like Digital Fusion has improved. I'll probably bump into it again some time soon.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.