Re: Shake Discontinued? by Phil Hoppes on Jul 31, 2009 at 2:12:32 pm
Well the macrumors article mention's Phenomenon which was suppose to replace Shake. Here is a link to an interesting article that discusses both Shake and Nuke.
According to the article, Shake is still the leading installed platform for composition but it is truly at end of life. Nuke appears to be making significant inroads buts its own future appears to have been rather in doubt lately.
Personally, since I'm a Maya user also, I've been looking at Toxik as a possible long term replacement for Shake but really I have no immediate need to replace Shake. For my piddly workflow Shake works fine. I only see a need over the horizon when my workflow migrates to 64bit. At that point in time I will probably need a replacement. Until then, Shake works just fine. I love using it. If I want a good key (and who wants a bad one!) or I need really good motion tracking, Shake beats FCS2 hands down. I don't have FCS3 yet so I can't make an assessment along those lines but in all the reviews I've seen of FCS3 I have not seen mention of improved keying or motion tracking, so unless those have been significantly improved, I don't see my use of Shake falling off.
This latest release on FCS really has me wondering on the committed direction of Apple to Pro Tools. If I let my musing go in one direction, given the explosion of Youtube and what all of us have seen as DIY video, Apple may see their growth as pushing pro video tools to the masses. The price drop alone in the FCS is pointing towards that. From a business and market share standpoint that makes a lot of sense so if I was a bean counter at Apple I would be hard pressed to disagree with that strategy. What I fear is that in chasing the high end of the mass market, our market, the professional market, will suffer in their tools offering as their quality of each of the specific tools will suffer. My previous point in keying and motion tracking are two areas where, in the absence of any other new tools or features to FCS, that can already be seen. Another point along these lines is the new release of FCS3 itself. Seeing other reviews, the new suite does fix some much needed problems like cleaning up Color round-tripping and markers (about friggin time). That being said, one can't help but wonder about their strategy too on this front. 2-1/2 years for a major clean up? That is enough time for an aggressive start-up to crate a whole new product and release it. Having worked in high tech for too many years also, they've really had more like 3 years because as FCS2 was in beta and getting ready to roll out most of the architects and design team I'm sure had been pulled off and should have been busy getting started on the "Next Big Thing" which should have been FCS3. To me this reaks of previous projects I've had to work on where you were balls to the wall going in one direction and some pointy haired boss walks in and says "Stop the bus, we are not going down that path, we are changing direction and going a different route". It is hard to discern if this is a trend or simply a product overlap glitch in a product roadmap but it does give one pause to wonder what their strategy is.
I'm sure everyone else in the AZFCUG has seen this far more than me but in just my short tenure of using FC you don't have to work with it too long to see that there are holes within the suite to get a complete job done. Don't get me wrong, I love FC for editing but across all of the tasks that I am now running into it is tough, if not impossible, to complete a product without a host of other tools outside of FCS to get the complete job accomplished. My fear is that if Apple places its primary focus on mass market appeal the high end quality of the suite could suffer pushing the truly pro user to have to adopt more alternative point tools to accomplish their tasks.
.... simply idle speculation on my part at the moment but for me at least, Apple's directional strategy is not all that clear.
Re: Shake Discontinued? by Phil Hoppes on Aug 4, 2009 at 12:18:34 pm
Hmm, well Maya 2010 has just been released and they have bundled Toxik with Maya. Toxik has a bit of a quirky interface but given I'm on subscription and it is a "free" upgrade for me I will take it. As long as it works it is tough to complain about.
Re: Shake Discontinued? by Randy Little on Aug 9, 2009 at 9:12:09 pm
The trackers in Motion are better then the ones in shake and Motion includes smoothcam and its the same as shake. (although I wouldn't comp in Motion to save my life)
Re: Shake Discontinued? by Phil Hoppes on Aug 10, 2009 at 1:06:04 am
I have had numerous instances of trying to track something in motion and finally just giving up. I move to shake and I can get a decent track on one or two passes. In addition shake will allow me to take an average across multiple trackers that I have set up. I don't know if motion can do this or not, honestly I've not tried. If you can get motion to work for you that is great. I just had more problems than I felt it was worth to try and make it work. After Effects CS4 comes with Mocha which looks interesting (I've not used it yet) and Maya 2010 has MatchMover so either way it looks like I will have plenty of options.
Re: Shake Discontinued? by Brad Buss on Aug 10, 2009 at 1:22:10 am
"(although I wouldn't comp in Motion to save my life)"
Yep, that's gist of it. I personally like Shake better for tracking, but I've used Motion for it and it's worked out okay too. But I'm not about to try and use Motion for doing a green screen key w/ blended Min/Maxed hard and soft mattes and faked rim lighting, nor would I want to attempt a layered cg composite with passes for specularity, ambient occlusion, et al.
Re: Shake Discontinued? by Randy Little on Aug 10, 2009 at 3:42:39 am
I think if you had the conduit node comper plug in for motion you might be super suprised what you can do in motion.
You can very easily average tracks in motion. Its just does it. I just did a bunch of pretty interesting tracking using the analyze motion and Match move operators. You just put a couple trackers all in the same space. I was pretty impressed by this track. I have been working with this for for a few days and Motion just did a better track then I was getting in shake. This made me open up the tracker and really have a look. That tracker is pretty bad ass its almost to complicated. and its missing the bounding box even though it has controls for the area in the HUD.
for motion graphics I love Motion for comping I would think that Toxik is the way to go. We are even holding off on Nuke until we get it on the Macs to see how well its going to work. Nuke is pretty awesome but Toxik might just be better for a lot of uses expecially with its round tripping to Maya
Re: Shake Discontinued? by Phil Hoppes on Aug 11, 2009 at 6:01:34 pm
You know that Toxik is no longer a stand alone product and that to get it you will need to purchase a seat of Maya. At $3500 for Maya 2010 that is still probably cheaper than one seat of Nuke and you get Maya and MatchMover too.
The latest on the download for Maya 2010 for subscription users is the 18th. I assume you are talking to the local VAR people over at the Cad Store. If you want to look at Toxik and don't have access let me know and I can show it to you when I get it.
Re: Shake Discontinued? by Brad Buss on Aug 4, 2009 at 9:50:21 pm
Yep, Apple either intentionally bought the top high-end compositor just to steal tracking and Optical Flow tech from it for Motion - just to let Shake itself rot to death, or someone at Apple is thinking a little bit TOO differently, as in they actually thought that a layer based AE clone w/ GPU preview whizzy-gigs and particle templates could actually completely replace the power of a node-based workflow.
BTW, PFMatch for Shake is now also EOL, so you can download a free license of it, I think only until the end of this month, so get it now.
Re: Shake Discontinued? by Randy Little on Aug 9, 2009 at 9:10:27 pm
Apple ADDED the optical flow stuff to Shake nearly 3 years after they bought it. On top of that They bought or License that optical flow technology from even another 3rd party that they don't own at all. Any way toxik is a pretty descent compositor as of 2009 since it finally has a full tool set. We are looking at it in leu of switching to Nuke.
Re: Shake Discontinued? by Brad Buss on Aug 10, 2009 at 1:27:07 am
Maya 2010 is quite the upgrade w/ both Toxik and MatchMover (RIP RealViz) now included for free. I hope that Softimage develops their node-based ICE compositor into a contender.
Re: Shake Discontinued? by Brad Buss on Sep 9, 2009 at 9:27:18 am
So how has your Toxik evaluation gone so far? Can anyone comment on the integration of Toxik with Maya 2009? Is it just a "send to Shake" type of integration, or is there further integration between the programs; like how Combustion reads the multiple render passes of 3DSMax renders in .fbx files?
