With Shake 4.1, Apple has opened the floodgates to the masses by lowering the price to $499. Also, this release is written in Universal Binary. Courtesy of Apple.

Shake is an advanced compositing tool that was originally designed to cater to the film world. Look up the Academy Award winning movies in visual effects over the last several years and they have all used Shake in some capacity. In this latest release, Shake 4.1, Apple has opened the floodgates to every user by lowering the price to $499. In addition to the new aggressive price point, the release is a Universal Binary, which means it will run natively on the Intel Macs as well as the PowerPC.

Buying Shake is almost a no-brainer at the new price. Users that have not needed the entire package, but wanted to use Shake for some of the individual functions such as keying or motion stabilization can now buy Shake for a price in line with what many plug-ins cost.

The Greatest Change of All
Although you won’t see a difference, you will most certainly feel a difference in performance. For this review, I ran Shake on a 17" MacBook Pro with 2GB of RAM and a 120GB hard disk. The performance increase when compared to a 1.67GHz Powerbook is remarkable. The bigger surprise is how Shake performs on the MacBook Pro when compared to a desktop Mac. The performance is on par with all but the fastest PowerMac (Quad 2.5GHz). Shake is not a real-time program. It works using accelerated frame playback within the in main interface or previews can be sent to disk or RAM for realtime previewing.

The big surprise is how well Shake performs on the MacBook Pro when compared to a desktop Mac. All images courtesy of Orlando Luna, unless otherwise indicated. 

When you first launch Shake you won’t notice any change at all. The interface and keystrokes remain almost the same. There are some minor changes that remap the F1-F4 keys to save functions instead of rotoscope control. Other changes include improvements to the Motion blur performance and proper display of the onscreen scale controls from all angles. There are a number of general enhancements that I found helpful:

• Shift-F in the Curve Editor now frames all selected points.

• When using the Send to Shake command from Final Cut Pro, the RetimeMotion node now works properly when using the Blend or Adapter modes.

• Zooming sensitivity using the +(plus) and -(minus) keys has been adjusted.

• Inverted OpenEXR files are now properly read and displayed.

• Shake now properly displays Photoshop PSD files that have been exported with alpha channels.

Getting Started with Shake
The first time I launched Shake I felt like someone who had only driven a car and was being the task of flying an airplane. I knew what Shake was supposed to be able to allow me to do, I just didn’t know how to do it. My experience had been with timeline based editing and motion graphics programs such as Final Cut Pro and After Effects. Fortunately, once I began to work with Shake I found I preferred a Node based compositing workflow to traditional timeline/layering tools. There is a timeline in Shake that can be used for basic timing functions. If you give Shake a chance you will find you will be flying in that Node based environment in no time.