Farewell, Shake

31.07.2009
Alas, one more high-end video production tool quietly succumbed to neglect and the rampant industry "end of life syndrome" (EOL)--after long being ignored by its foster parent, Apple.

Apple has quietly discontinued the sale of Shake, which was for years the highest end professional compositing tool on the market. While Apple has made no formal announcement about Shake one way or another, the , particularly since the site now redirects to a page for the Final Cut Studio video editing suite.

was the kind of tool that once you mastered its very non-Mac nodal interface, the kind that makes ( Macworld rated 3.5 out of 5 mice ) easy to use by comparison, you found a wonderfully powerful compositor. This was a professional tool that did not hopelessly stumble along when doing RGB to YUV conversions, handling large film style DPX files, or keying greenscreen footage, in the horrible manner that the other tools in the suite have for so long. Shake was designed to handle the type of files used at the pinnacle of the Hollywood workflow, with the film industry standard DPX files in the 2K, and even the 65mm Imax frame size. No one thought about the fact that Shake was effortlessly handling 4K files more than five years prior to everyone jumping on the Red 4K bandwagon.

Apple acquired Shake from the Venice, California-based in February 2002. Apple needed the Hollywood hype and the underlying engineering and programming within Shake, and that software engineering is spread throughout the last three releases of Final Cut Studio.

The most visible part of Shake that people see is still the Qmaster rendering engine, used everywhere from to ( Macworld rated 4.5 out of 5 mice ), and even accessible in current tools like Red Digital Cinema's . Qmaster was the unifying tool that allowed users to distribute rendering across multiple CPUs in addition to multiple cores on each of those CPUs.

I was lucky to be aboard the very first Apple Shake Train, the trainer classes held at Apple's Santa Monica office in the summer of 2002, and I still to this day remember it fondly, as much for the people I met as the knowledge that poured out from that very small group of seven. I was the only person in the room who was not a working LA-based or compositing artist.