Why I buy this one ?
- Compositing software for both single artists and visual effects facilities
- 3-D multi-plane compositing; cutting-edge optical-flow image processing
- 32-bit Keylight and Primatte keying; Final Cut Pro 5 integration
- Intuitively create sophisticated film and television visual effects
- Auto-align for creating seamless panoramas from multiple images

What our customer's say!

"Wonderful, complex, not AE", Shake's extremely customizable, powerful, and complex. I'm totally loving it.

First, it is NOT a direct substitute for Adobe's After Effects (AE). It has primitive text handling abilities, you cannot simply drop files into layers and drag them around to animate them, and it has no particle systems, etc. Fortunately, Apple's Motion software nicely complements Shake and handles these tasks well.

Second, Shake's paradigm is very different from AE's in many ways, from the way Shake's timeline works and feels to the way a project's resolution is determined, from the node-based processing to it's command-line capability. You can use expressions, as in AE, but you can also create macros which then appear as if they were built-in filters/effects. (In fact, quite a few "built-in" effects are actually macros.) And that is one of the great strengths of Shake: with time and lots of learning and thinking, you can turn Shake into an application that's almost designed for your workflow.

Shake's so big that it's impossible to cover it all. It includes two brand-name keyers (Primatte and Keylight) plus other keying tools. It has a rotoshape node that can contain multiple bezier-curved, animated (or not) matte shapes. It has a stroke-based paint/clone node. It has traditional tracker and stabilization nodes as well as a flow-based analysis node for stabilization (either lock-down or just smoothing). It has multiple warping nodes (formula-based, spline-based, as well as one specialized for lens distortion) and a morphing node. It has a node to stitch together multiple still or moving background panoramas. It has a boatload of color correction nodes. It has a 3D multi-plane node (though they do not include lights and do not handle plane intersection) as well as a 2D multi-layer node that provides layer transfer modes between layers.

You have full control over transformations of video on input, including resizing, de-interlacing, and retiming, including a flow-analysis retiming which can create incredible slo-mo footage that you simply cannot create with frame-blending (which is another option, if you wish).

It's node-based approach lets you simply accomplish things that would take all kinds of crazy comp nesting in AE (if you could figure out how to do it at all in AE). Shake's timeline displays image/movie "layers" but they are only used for positioning in time -- all processing/compositing/layering is accomplished by nodes and how they are linked together, not by what layer appears on top in the timeline. Each input on a node (there can be more than one, depending on what the node does) can only accept a single input, but each output can be split off in as many directions as you want. Take a node's output and split it off to four different sets of nodes for procesing and eventual recombination. (Which would require at least four nested comps to achieve in AE.)

Any group of nodes you wire together can be collapsed into a group and you can specify what controls from the nodes inside the group are visible outside of the group. If you find yourself doing this often, you can save the group as a macro, which will then appear alongside all the other built-in nodes in their various palettes.

You do not set a "comp size" in Shake. The size of the comp depends on the sizes of the elements you put into it, the nodes you use to process them, and the point in processing where you insert file-out nodes. (You can have multiple file-out nodes in a node tree to render out the processed image at that point in processing.) This flexibility can be a little disturbing at first, but in the end it works like most of the rest of Shake: it takes more thought to set up, but once you've done it once and have your template file or macro setup, it's as if you'd built a custom preference/feature.

You can have multiple viewers, each of which has an A/B tab and you can load the output of different nodes into each tab and flip between them, or drag/fade between them. Another example of Shake's customizability: you can create multiple macros and choose among them (or have none) to customize the look of each viewer. Add safe zone marks, change the gamma, tint safe zones instead of making lines... whatever you can do with Shake nodes you can do to your viewer window.

OK, that only hits the major points that come to mind at midnight. I didn't get to the Curves editor, the incredible color pickers, keyboard shortcuts, it's heavy-duty proxy/update system, commandline use, or its ability to fully use multiple CPUs. (I've found AE often leaves a substantial portion of multiple CPU's unused.)

Incredible power and customizability. But again, if you're moving up from AE don't expect it to be a quick or easy process. Your instincts will be wrong and you will go about things in the wrong way, even if you conceptually understand node-orientation. And, again, for quick throw-layers-in, set transfer-modes, and setup some quick keyframe jobs AE will be faster than Shake. (Though as long as the files are reaonable-sized, Motion will be faster than AE. Motion doesn't like working on layers or comps that exceed 2K x 2K in resolution, though.) If you want nice text (pair-wise kerning, etc), you'll need to use Motion to make it, then bring it into Shake.

I give it 5 stars. (P.S. paid-for upgrades are not cheap. See the Apple website under Shake for the price to upgrade to the current version (4.0). I believe this is what you'd pay for a yearly support contract, which would give you support and all upgrades in that year free of charge.)