are we missing a number here? like a 0 at the end or a 2 in the beginning?

Is this another Sony HDR-FX1 HDV camera for $1999 at the Apple Store online--only to be told it's sold out when you try and order? That's a heck of a price... has anyone tried to order it?

I ordered it this morning, accepted and confirmed.

No worries since it is an official announcement.

This is no doubt part of Steve Jobs' plan to get even with Adobe who've been putting their Apple products on the backburner lately.

Even the $1,000 After Effects Pro doesn't come close to what Shake can do overall, although there may be some crumbs left to gnaw on.

And then there is their educational pricing:

$129 per seat for 5 and up...

(and slightly higher for single copies bought at student bookstores)

I wouldn't want to be the Combustion, Fusion, or After Effects Product Manager today...

Thanks for the info. I've never taken to After Effects and prefer to bumble through most things in Vegas (although it can hurt at times). Shake's interface seems interesting to me and it appears to operate well with FCP. Have you used Shake much? Is it harder to learn than AE?

My issue w/ 3rd party apps, like After Effects, is the shifting the files to/from the NLE and compositing app. In an ideal world, I would know what I want my segment/effect to like before I started. Then I could export (or open) the files in the compositing app and do the segment there. But it just never, ever, works that way for me. The idea of launching After Effects or Shake from the timeline seems like a way for me to start incorporating these more complex programs. The only problem is making the switch to Adobe Premiere or FCP.

I don't think Shake is harder to learn than AE.

For the same capability (i.e. what AE can do), I would argue that Shake is easier to learn, because the user interface is much more clear.

Now there are advanced features in Shake that require training not in the UI, but just in advanced compositing, masking, and painting techniques.

Roundtripping from/to an NLE doesn't matter so much for those who put a lot of planning into their work (like in Hollywood).

I'm still hoping for the appropriate interfaces to make this kind of integration possible in Vegas 7.

For what you save with Shake, you can get a pretty tricked out G5 to run it on.

I think this is more of a fire sale.
From the little I know Apple have never gained any traction in the high end CGI / compositing business. All of this has been done on Intel / AMD farms, I think their boxes were just too slow and too hard to add the necessary interfaces to.
An interesting question might be if Apple will do a full code port to Intel, if not then you could be left with a very slow running app under Rosetta.

Bob.

This is a Universal Binary, i.e. it runs at full speed on MacBook Pros today and on MacPro towers in Auguest.

Apple has actually had a lot of traction with Shake in Hollywood. Many of the movies you see in theaters are showing Shake output.

It's at the low end and far high end (Flame) where they haven't done much. On the other hand, Flame had to go Linux to continue, but it's amazing what they were able to squeeze out of old SGI boxes (beyond today's best PCs actually).

G5s are going to sell for scrap value, or worse: toxic waste disposal fee, soon (price collapse starting August when the new Intel towers are introduced).

as a fusion user I can tel you AE, Shake and Combustion are not in the same league at all.

besides it depends on what happens next, this is a final sale of buggy software and discontinued maintenance. Supposedly a new version of software ( or something completely different ) will be out in 2008. So this means death of Shake, but for $500 may not be a bad deal, ( if you are one of the unfortunate people who use Macs )it's finally selling for what it's worth :-)

Here are a few recent Hollywood films that were unfortunate enough to have been done with Shake:

Spider-Man, Harry Potter, X-Men, Lord of The Rings, Matrix

Poor guys struggling with buggy software and discontinued maintenance.

:O)

I sincerely believe you are talking about the original Windows NT version of Shake, before the company was acquired by Apple.

There are rumors about Apple coming out with a different paradigm for compositing software in 2008.

Can make a lot of money with Shake in the meantime.

Fusion, AE, Combustion, and Shake all have different strengths. When it comes to massive numbers of layers though, I think Shake is the only one that will still work.

On the other hand, Flame had to go Linux to continue, but it's amazing what they were able to squeeze out of old SGI boxes (beyond today's best PCs actually).
That's probably because:
A- SGI is not solid financially, and recently went into chapter. 11 bankruptcy protection. Avoiding a reliance on SGI machines helps Autodesk a little... i.e. still being able to purchase workstations, replacement parts.
B- SGI may have discontinued certain workstations because of lead-free requirements (they have to re-design the boards, which costs money).
C- SGI computers haven't kept up in performance compared to alternatives.
D- Modern GPUs have recently become a lot more programmable into doing (basically) hardware acceleration. They can be an order of magnitude (10-20X) faster than generalized desktop CPUs (i.e. AMD opteron, Intel Xeon) at specialised tasks like image processing.

SGI was originally developed for high performance computing... and they were fast machines.

no, it actually went downhill since apple got involved. I did my research before dropping a chunk of change on compositing software, and there were a lot of pissed off people using shake.

Fusion 5 was buggy too, when it came out, but eyeon is known for listening and fixing things quickly, something apple knows nothing about. Fusion has stuff shake doesn't while you can do anything in Fusion that ou can do in shake ( Particles and 3d in Fusion are way beyond shake's capabilities )

flame, fusion, nuke = hi end

shake = mid level, , combustion, ae = low end

>>Spider-Man, Harry Potter, X-Men, Lord of The Rings, Matrix.

Now it's clearer why those were as bad as they were.

Why use a wannabe ( Shake ) when there is the real thing. Look at the interface, it's like a carbon copy of fusion ( + extra apple added cheeze ).

If you don't want to take my word for it here is a quote from somebody who was and is is involved with both ( development and training for Shake and Fusion ):

Fusion has 3d particles that kick ass
3d objects that can be mapped
rpf with UV support so you can changing lighting with normals right out of the box
super fast 3d environment. Better looking nulls on 3d tracks so you can find your data better


the list goes on and on. I help develop BOTH of them. I used shake back in the nothing real days and still use it on contracts today. But fusion will blast that app out of the water. PLEASE NOTE shake hasnt changed much in 10 years.... AND someone might argue that apple should have used the silicon grail chalice and rayz instead of shake for there future.

By the By, a lot of the 3d space in shake was from my beta program feed back. And they got it horribly wrong. Also the fact that they no longer supported the tremor interface was a bad thing. SINCE IT WAS DESIGNED FOR HIGH DEF.

Shakes guis is functional but based on slow code. Fusion was designed around alias maya back in the day. so its newer and faster.

So the choice is between paying $5,000 for the Fusion real thing or $500 for the Shake wannabe (for those who don't want to work in 8-bit).

It's in a sense odd that so very few compositors in either the U.S. or Europe use Fusion, the vast majority by far use Shake/Flame/Combustion.

Wonder why Apple's Shake compositing and visual effects software has been used in every Academy Award-winning film for visual effects since its debut.?

Nuke is up and coming I guess you could say (developed at Digital Domain a few miles from here, classy outfit that uses Combustion a lot however, including for the current Battlestar Galactica). Nice deal for only $5,000, should get a boost from Michael Bay.

Fusion seems better to me than Combustion in some but not all areas, but the price is also quite a bit higher. Bummer about its AE-API being less AE compatible than C*'s ditto, but C* really needs an updated API also, and Autodesk seems to have fallen asleep at the wheel.

After Effects is better for motion graphics than any of the other packages here, and that will perhaps always be its niche.

I have both Combustion 4 and AE 7, and I'm adding Shake (and I think I can live with whatever weaknesses the major studios are able to put up with).

A lot of people got tired of seeing the crappy performance of PowerMacs, and it looked to me like Adobe was about ready to bail from this platform. They probably thought Apple would shrivel up and die, whereas the opposite has happened (and 500,000 FCP licenses so far is pretty respectable also).

The issue of Mac performance has already changed with the Intel Core Duo-based MacBook Pro, and in August we should see some very competent MacPro towers with excellent performance.

There is no perfect platform for anything, it's all a compromise, but it's good to have choices, and it's good to know multiple tools for compositing, paint, etc.

How are the paint tools in Fusion?

AE has worthless paint, and Combustion has decent but certainly not Flame level paint.

Do you think Fusion's particle generator can match Trapcode Particular?

Shake's flowchart design is a big issue when you can showing how to achieve an effect.

Coursedesign, Apple has been pissed with a few companies the last couple of years. But I agree with you, this is great. Apple has been offering special deals on shake to many of the production companies; but I think this is a great move for Apple, now computer system plus software is affordable for many more customers,( less illegal copies or free copies being passed out for promos). More Apple computers in my house now, I think.

Apple is even offering source code licenses for Shake 4.1.

Only $50,000 and that includes 5,000 seats....

(This is really meant for ILM and some of the other largest production companies where they also like to add their own stuff.)

I read that Apple will no longer develop Shake--its considered a mature product---They will however sell the code to developers for 50,000 bucks.

Fusion is expensive, and some of the plug ins for it are easily $1000 or more. But out of the box you can do just about everything. For example, I tried ultimatte and primatte for keying ( ultimatte alone is $1500 ) and you can do just as well using Fusion's native keyers.

Why more people use Shake, I don't know. More people used VHS even though it was clearly inferior to betamax, People still use Avid xpress pro over Vegas even though it's a joke of an application.
Stratocaters and Les Pauls remained the most popular guitars for years even though they ceased to be Les Pauls and Stratocasters in the 60s. People don't research and try new things. They just go with marketing and what the guy next door is using ( same problem Vegas has in the industry )

Old habits and myths die hard ( you should be using a Mac for example ).

So, you'll have Combustion, AE and Shake, and still be underpowered compared to Fusion alone :-).

I think version 5 works with pretty much all AE plugins, haven't needed any though, so I can't verfy . AE was never an option for me, tried it and hated it, Combustion was eliminated because everybody I spoke too said it was a minor league compred to fusion, and Shake wasn't ( and still isn't ) an option because it's mac only and just seemed slow and crappy compared to even the prevous version of fusion.

The only downside to Fuson i that you pay a nice price for the app and the best support in business, but you never get to use that support bcause the program just works ( or is that the upside : -) )

I've only toyed with the learning edition of Fusion 5 but I gotta say I'm very impressed and hey it started out life down under. You don't have to lay down the big bucks upfront, the 8 bit version is pretty competitively priced and you can upgrade to the full deal without having to learn another application, this I do like. The list of movies done with it is also pretty long and impressive.
I'll gladly pay a premium price not to use anything Apple, reality is they make uStuff look like the Red Cross, I'd be happier giving my dollars to Exxon than Apple.

Bob.

I've also been impressed with Fusion, but at US$1295 for the 8-bit version compared to $995 for Combustion's 10-bit through float version, it was an easy choice for me.

A number of AE plug-in vendors say specifically that they don't work with Fusion because of an API limitation. A very small number of those plug-ins don't work with Combustion either, but this is of course academic if you don't need those plugs.

Apple is good and bad like all other vendors. They make hardware and software that is more elegant and generally more easy to use, and the large user base means they have a gigantic community of helpful people.

Microsoft ate the poisoned apple of middle management growth and can't get anything done anymore, as mini-popes in every cubicle do their best to throttle progress to a "comfortable level." I have seen this exact symptom in many companies, none of which are in business today.

Longhorn should have been out many years ago, and with more features than next year's Vista.

IE is a complete joke of a 2001 model-year browser.

The various components of MS Office have substantial bugs that have been in the code for more than 10 years, etc., etc.

The only questions for M$ is who is going to succeed Ballmer, and how soon.

It seems to me that Ballmer is looking at M$ not as a team of flesh-and-blood people who can get things done, but as an organizational chart with boxes that just have to be filled with "nominally qualified human resources."

Good luck with that.

Perhaps he will be the first to succeed with this model.