Re: Holy Crap I love Shake! by Andrew Shanks on Oct 10, 2008 at 2:18:11 am
Yeah, Shake certainly is a sweet application, the rumor why Apple stopped developing it in its current form was that the code was getting too old and a rewrite was necessary (i.e. base it on a newer faster codeset), ...but who knows, ...its still a good application and its a great way to learn film compositing, ...also despite it being EOLed, there is still life in the old girl yet, a number of large facilities (particularly in London) have bought the source code and released new 64bit in house versions which bundle a lot of their own nodes, etc, ...and a number of facilities still have old Shake 2.5 windows boxes kicking around, still going strong. It is also a great application for students wanting to learn nodal compositing techniques, as it is easy to translate your skills in Shake to other nodal systems such as Nuke and Fusion.
Having said that, if you have been a Shake compositor and you have a look at what the likes of Nuke can do, it makes you wonder where Shake would be now if it hadn't been killed off in its prime (...I'm just a recent convert to Nuke, but you can see they had a good hard look at simplifying a lot of the work we do, while retaining (and in a number of cases, adding to) the power and tweakability). Nuke still has some rough edges, paint/roto needs work, and stability is not as rock solid as Shake, ...but there's a lot to love in that package, and i am excited to see what the next revision will be like.
