Re: Would you buy Shake now if you didn't have it?

I would say that chances of Shake working on Snow Leopard are pretty good. From what I've seen (http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10310131-37.html and other posts) the changes between Leopard and Snow Leopard are just not that great. The big difference is that Apple final released a 64bit API so people like Adobe and Autodesk can finally create 64 bit versions of their applications that can actually use the 64bit memory space. Calling Leopard 64bit without any API was a ruse at best and a joke to the users.

I am a Maya user as well as a Shake user. Autodesk just released their one of their compositors, Toxik, with the new 2010 version of Maya. I have it and have started to play around with it a little but, coming from Shake, it is more than a little strange. It is node based which is nice. The UI takes some getting use to. It forces to full screen mode which I don't like. It only renders to image sequences which I also find strange. I guess in the major production houses that use Maya, this is probably not, but for a single person shop I've used shake to capture my image sequences, composite with other footage and create a .mov that I can then use in either AE or FCP for my final production assembly. At the moment from what I've seen, it is no replacement for Shake in a long run.

I don't know. For me there is no compelling reason to quit using shake. I finally understand it and it simply works. There are still a slew of plugins for it as well as good training. Nuke is cool (and written by the same guy that created shake) but my budget can't justify $5K. As long as shake works on SL, and I'm guessing it will, the only reason in the long run to quit using shake is you are forced to because either you don't have a module to bring in your input footage or you can't get to a desire output footage. Till then, as the saying goes, they will have to pry it from my cold dead fingers.