Apple Shake 4 Mac OS X [OLD VERSION]

by Apple

Product Features

• Compositing software for both single artists and visual effects facilities
• 3-D multi-plane compositing; cutting-edge optical-flow image processing
• 32-bit Keylight and Primatte keying; Final Cut Pro 5 integration
• Intuitively create sophisticated film and television visual effects
• Auto-align for creating seamless panoramas from multiple images

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 8.2 x 3.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6 pounds
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S. and to APO/FPO addresses. For APO/FPO shipments, please check with the manufacturer regarding warranty and support issues.
• ASIN: B000A3VXY4
• Item model number: M9935Z/A
• Date first available at Amazon.com: June 30, 2005
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #17,855 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)

Product Description

From the Manufacturer

Shake 4 is the only compositing software with a complete toolset for both single artists and visual effects facilities. With 3-D multi-plane compositing; 32-bit keylight and primatte keying; cutting-edge optical-flow image processing; Final Cut Pro 5 integration; and an open, extensible scripting language, Shake 4 delivers all the tools required for sophisticated film and television visual effects.

Already in a Theater Near You
The choice of Oscar-winning effects artists seven years in a row, Shake now offers a host of new features that give you the highest quality output for film and HD. Use Shake to create convincing, photorealistic, Hollywood-caliber visual effects on a desktop--and on a budget.

Shake 4 offers an affordable, high-quality post-production solution for film and television visual effects, providing the complete toolset you need to create visually stunning content--whether as part of a large facility or in a boutique operation.

Unified 2D/3D Compositing

Shake delivers the most efficient compositing operations for handling large images with pristine quality. From full 32-bit float Keylight and Primatte keyers to OpenGL-accelerated 3-D multi-plane compositing, no other visual effects software delivers as complete a toolset for individual artists and full visual effects facilities.

• 3-D multi-plane compositing
• Enhanced node view
• Resolution independence
• Tracking on rotoshape points
• 32-bit keylight and primatte
• Truelight monitor calibration

Advanced Image Processing

Shake leads the way in integrating the latest image processing technology into a single, affordable visual effects package. Shake’s Optical Flow technology uses pixel-by-pixel image analysis to create smooth retiming, incredible high-quality resizing, and automatic stabilization. The results are cleaner, sharper, and more natural-looking images.

• Optical flow-based retiming
• Smoothcam and tracking
• Shape-based warping and morphing
• Auto-align

Open, Customizable Architecture

Extend the out-of-the-box feature set by using Shake’s internal C-like scripting language and macros to make custom effects and functions. This open, extensible architecture makes Shake completely customizable for large production pipelines: incorporate Shake commands with AppleScript, PERL, or other scripting tools. Run Shake from the interface or the Unix Terminal, depending on your needs as a compositor, 3-D artist, or technical director.

• Scripting
• Expressions
• Macros

Top New Features in Shake 4:

• OpenGL-accelerated 3-D compositing
• Final Cut Pro 5 integration
• Advanced optical flow-based retiming
• Smoothcam for automatic stabilization and smoothing of bumpy pans
• Auto-align for creating seamless panoramas from multiple images
• Rotoshapes with tracking and variable soft edges per control vertice
• 32-bit Primatte and Keylight keyers included
• Truelight monitor calibration
• Enhanced Node view with Favorite views
• Cache node for improved performance
• Improved finishing quality effects and output

Product Description

Used to create the world's most celebrated visual effects, Shake 4 is the only compositing software delivering a complete toolset for both single artists and visual effects facilities. With 3D multi-plane compositing, Keylight and Primatte keying, optical flow image processing and Final Cut Pro 5 integration, Shake 4 delivers all the tools required for sophisticated visual effects.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful, complex, not AE, January 25, 2006

By 

Wayne Folta (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Apple Shake 4 Mac OS X [OLD VERSION] (CD-ROM)

Shake's extremely customizable, powerful, and complex. I'm totally loving it.

First, it is NOT a direct substitute for Adobe's After Effects (AE). It has primitive text handling abilities, you cannot simply drop files into layers and drag them around to animate them, and it has no particle systems, etc. Fortunately, Apple's Motion software nicely complements Shake and handles these tasks well.

Second, Shake's paradigm is very different from AE's in many ways, from the way Shake's timeline works and feels to the way a project's resolution is determined, from the node-based processing to it's command-line capability. You can use expressions, as in AE, but you can also create macros which then appear as if they were built-in filters/effects. (In fact, quite a few "built-in" effects are actually macros.) And that is one of the great strengths of Shake: with time and lots of learning and thinking, you can turn Shake into an application that's almost designed for your workflow.

Shake's so big that it's impossible to cover it all. It includes two brand-name keyers (Primatte and Keylight) plus other keying tools. It has a rotoshape node that can contain multiple bezier-curved, animated (or not) matte shapes. It has a stroke-based paint/clone node. It has traditional tracker and stabilization nodes as well as a flow-based analysis node for stabilization (either lock-down or just smoothing). It has multiple warping nodes (formula-based, spline-based, as well as one specialized for lens distortion) and a morphing node. It has a node to stitch together multiple still or moving background panoramas. It has a boatload of color correction nodes. It has a 3D multi-plane node (though they do not include lights and do not handle plane intersection) as well as a 2D multi-layer node that provides layer transfer modes between layers.

You have full control over transformations of video on input, including resizing, de-interlacing, and retiming, including a flow-analysis retiming which can create incredible slo-mo footage that you simply cannot create with frame-blending (which is another option, if you wish).

It's node-based approach lets you simply accomplish things that would take all kinds of crazy comp nesting in AE (if you could figure out how to do it at all in AE). Shake's timeline displays image/movie "layers" but they are only used for positioning in time -- all processing/compositing/layering is accomplished by nodes and how they are linked together, not by what layer appears on top in the timeline. Each input on a node (there can be more than one, depending on what the node does) can only accept a single input, but each output can be split off in as many directions as you want. Take a node's output and split it off to four different sets of nodes for procesing and eventual recombination. (Which would require at least four nested comps to achieve in AE.)

Any group of nodes you wire together can be collapsed into a group and you can specify what controls from the nodes inside the group are visible outside of the group. If you find yourself doing this often, you can save the group as a macro, which will then appear alongside all the other built-in nodes in their various palettes.

You do not set a "comp size" in Shake. The size of the comp depends on the sizes of the elements you put into it, the nodes you use to process them, and the point in processing where you insert file-out nodes. (You can have multiple file-out nodes in a node tree to render out the processed image at that point in processing.) This flexibility can be a little disturbing at first, but in the end it works like most of the rest of Shake: it takes more thought to set up, but once you've done it once and have your template file or macro setup, it's as if you'd built a custom preference/feature.

You can have multiple viewers, each of which has an A/B tab and you can load the output of different nodes into each tab and flip between them, or drag/fade between them. Another example of Shake's customizability: you can create multiple macros and choose among them (or have none) to customize the look of each viewer. Add safe zone marks, change the gamma, tint safe zones instead of making lines... whatever you can do with Shake nodes you can do to your viewer window.

OK, that only hits the major points that come to mind at midnight. I didn't get to the Curves editor, the incredible color pickers, keyboard shortcuts, it's heavy-duty proxy/update system, commandline use, or its ability to fully use multiple CPUs. (I've found AE often leaves a substantial portion of multiple CPU's unused.)

Incredible power and customizability. But again, if you're moving up from AE don't expect it to be a quick or easy process. Your instincts will be wrong and you will go about things in the wrong way, even if you conceptually understand node-orientation. And, again, for quick throw-layers-in, set transfer-modes, and setup some quick keyframe jobs AE will be faster than Shake. (Though as long as the files are reaonable-sized, Motion will be faster than AE. Motion doesn't like working on layers or comps that exceed 2K x 2K in resolution, though.) If you want nice text (pair-wise kerning, etc), you'll need to use Motion to make it, then bring it into Shake.

I give it 5 stars. (P.S. paid-for upgrades are not cheap. See the Apple website under Shake for the price to upgrade to the current version (4.0). I believe this is what you'd pay for a yearly support contract, which would give you support and all upgrades in that year free of charge.)

5.0 out of 5 stars Something to be appreciated., October 5, 2010

By 

Tyler - See all my reviews

This review is from: Apple Shake 4 Mac OS X [OLD VERSION] (CD-ROM)

The capabilities of this software are limitless. At that note, this is a very professional video production tool, and this template may not be feasible for the amateur videographer. This software was the main interface used to create the newest King Kong; just to give you an idea of the special effects abilities of this superb product. This product is expensive for a reason. You pay for quality and capability.