Apple Announces Shake 2.5 For Mac OS X (Half Price), Linux, IRIX & Windows

by , 7:00 PM EDT, July 22nd, 2002

Apple today announced Shake 2.5, a compositing and visual effects software package. Shakes target market is the high-end post production workflow on motion pictures and television shows. From the press release:

Shake is high-performance compositing software designed for large format productions. Shake features the fastest rendering engine on the market, an extensive and mature compositing toolset and an imaging architecture that simultaneously supports multiple bit depths and provides superior image quality. Shake 2.5 adds an improved image input, a disk-based proxy system and the ability to limit the rendering process to a portion of an image for quicker processing.

Shake 2.5 is the first release of the program under the ownership of Apple since the company Nothing Real was bought back in February of this year. It will be available for Mac OS X, Linux, IRIX and Windows in August of this year. The Mac OS X package will retail for US $4,950 with an annual maintenance fee of US $1,199 while the Linux, IRIX and Windows versions will retail for US $9,900 with an annual maintenance fee of US $1,485.

More information on Shake 2.5 can be found in the press release and at Apple's Shake Web site.

The Mac Observer Spin:

Back in February when we first covered Apple's purchase of Nothing Real, we suspected Apple was preparing to make itself a power house in the professional film editing and effects market. Apple is trying to position itself in the professional market in much the same way as they are trying to create the "digital hub" in the consumer market. So far, the company seems to be right on track.

If simply making Shake available for Mac OS X isn't enough to draw you to the benefits of the Mac (Photoshop, Maya, Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, etc.), Apple has priced the Mac version of the program at half the cost of the Linux, IRIX and Windows versions.

For those keeping score at home, that means that a user of Shake on one of those "other" platforms could buy the Mac OS X version, and with the savings buy themselves a top of the line PowerMac, with enough change left over to put a nice down payment on a Cinema Display HD. There is no better incentive than a half-price tag to draw users into Apple's idea of the professional "digital hub" concept. That said, Apple's pricing structure is sure to make a few existing Shake users tense. It will be interesting to watch reaction in this market.

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