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

Shake still is everywhere in the film fx world and will be around for a few more years yet. London is heavily shake still as a number of big houses bought the code and have upgraded it themselves to support 64bit workflow. Having said that, Nuke is starting to be adopted at many places (weta and ILM now have site-wide licences), Australia's two most prominent fx houses have switched to Nuke, and I think more will quickly follow as freelancers start to get trained up and used to it.

So should you buy shake?

Depends. If you can afford Nuke, get it, it is the future and has some sweet tools and a great 3d interface. If you are a student or a freelancer, get Shake, ....just because it is no longer supported doesn't mean it will stop working straight away (advanced word is it still runs fine under snow leopard rendering 10bit quicktimes). It is a strong solid compositor that has been used on many high end oscar winning fx films (LOTR, King Kong, District9, etc), so you can still do very good work with it (its the skill of the artist as much as the toolset, and the tools are good for the most part). Also it will teach you nodal compositing skills that easily translate to Nuke (I'be gone that route, am now a nuke user, and its not hard to make the transition).

Goodluck,

andrew