Re: Learning shake or AE to do specific tasks

Well actually either Shake of AE would allow you to do these shots. Since Adobe has added Imagineer's Mocha to AE it now has good rotoscoping functionality and both Shake and AE can do decent paint work which is sort of the direction I think you'll have to go in for your shots:

1) Shake's QuickPaint node could be used to get rid of subtitles
2) Looks like a straight-forward garbage matte job
3) A lot of work, but probably could be done. You'll have to roto your character and then either paint or use a wraparound (possibly using Shake's AutoAlign) to recreate your BG plate.

This question gets asked a lot and the quick answer is of course that both Shake and AE are great for compositing work, but in AE you can also do motion graphics. Technically you can in Shake as well, but it would be a cumbersome nightmare since it is really set up for a strictly compositing workflow. :)

(And personally I use Silhouette Roto whenever I have a lot of precision roto work to do and import the shapes into Shake, since it is much better at that since it is designed to be a dedicated roto and paint tool. Usually the only times I create new shapes with Shake's RotoShape node is when I'm just doing simple garbage mattes and stuff like that.)

Both Shake and AE are deep programs with steep learning curves but approaching it the way you are can work, i.e. getting started right away on a real project. I really started to get comfortable with Shake when I started using it in real projects.