Nothing Real, the producer of popular compositing tool Shake, has announced that their new Tremor compositing system has entered into worldwide beta testing. Tremor is a front room, client-based compositing solution, engineered to handle the most demanding needs of HDTV, commercial video and broadcast production professionals. The product is built around a new, simplified and streamlined interface and incorporates the mature and production proven technology based on Shake's rendering engine. Tremor will be sold as an integrated compositing hardware/software product. BBC Science in the United Kingdom is the first customer to have purchased the system, and is positioning it as a key component in its production pipeline. "When we needed to expand our 2D department we wanted to invest in a system which was at the forefront of compositing technology. We were already using Shake extensively, so being able to have all the functionality of Shake along with the real-time capabilities of Tremor made it an obvious choice," said Angela Barson, BBC Science freelance digital compositor. "Having one Tremor system and several Shake floating licenses will allow compositors using other software packages to collaborate more effectively by switching to Shake whenever the shot requires it. Distributed rendering on our render farm will also ensure that the real-time systems are not affected by local background rendering. In addition, the availability of Tinder plug-ins will also bring added functionality to Tremor as well as provide a degree of familiarity and consistency across all our platforms." Tremor 1.0 is scheduled for release in April 2001.