What happened to Shake?

Discontinued and partially incorporated into Motion. I bought a copy the day that news went out.

Motion in Final Cut Studio 3 is to Shake what iMovie '08 was to iMovie '06. It's nowhere near as fully featured, but all signs point to the next update being a very good replacement.

You're a little late to the party but it's still a tragic story and I'm sure it's one we all wish had a happier ending. You may know some of what happened but here's a recap:

Shake used to be a cross-platform product made by Nothing Real.
Apple bought the company in 2002. They discontinued the Windows version around 2.5.
They made little to no improvements to the software except for the Multiplane node, which was a fairly half-assed attempt at putting motion graphics capability into a compositing app not built for it.
Time went on and we got the universal version, the price drop and then boom - EOL.
Out of the blue, they just drop the industry standard compositing software like a brick. Some of the Shake team leave Apple and go to work at The Foundry on Nuke.
Apple made their Motion app, which is obviously what they wanted to do all along but right now, it's far less powerful (and stable) than Shake and that's saying something when it comes to stability.
Apple have added some things from Shake back into Motion but it doesn't have the same flexibility like opening multiple comp trees or nesting comps. The grouping means you don't need pre-comps, which is great but it's still hard to logically separate comps.

If you want a Shake replacement, there's no question, you should use Nuke.
If you want motion graphics, use either AE or Motion. The former is more reliable but the latter is faster.

A dream application would be timeline focused like the motion graphics packages but complimented with a non-inear compositing effects part that was entirely hardware-accelerated but could be executed on the CPU when the GPU was overloaded.

Making a UI for that is the hardest part because you're going to end up catering to one of 3 groups of people - the NLE crowd, the motion graphics crowd or the node-based compositor crowd. The likely outcome is that none of them would be happy. The NLE crowd don't want to change FCP. The motion graphics crowd don't want to change AE, they just want it to be faster and the noodle-heads just want Shake back, hence why Nuke looks exactly like Shake now.

Personally, I think the Nuke/Shake UI was wrong because it focuses too specifically on the effects in a single scene. That's what it is for of course but that doesn't have widespread appeal. The Motion Graphics UIs do have wider appeal as they are familiar but too linear. They need a new UI that merges the best of all of them but it's how to do that without needing an extra dimension in the universe.

I hope one day Apple figures it out but I think the people who have the ability to do it are not at Apple any more and their lack of updates to their Pro Apps suggests it's not a big concern for them.

The problem with Apple is they don't make their bread and butter from this, it comes from hardware. Companies like Autodesk, The Foundry and so on make a living from this so they have to keep their products competitive.

I think that Apple will keep building on top of Motion and I do think that they had to start from the ground up on the GPU but it will take a long time to get to where Shake was. I don't see them jumping to nodes in one revision and I don't actually see any indication that they plan Motion to be a successor to Shake but rather a competitor to AE so that people don't have to buy both FCS and AE.

What I find interesting is that Apple have made a non-linear compositor in the form of Quartz composer that is arguably more powerful than Motion. It can even be used for augmented reality:

http://vimeo.com/2375562
http://vimeo.com/groups/2086/videos/6838405

If they get that level of functionality into Motion alongside a powerful macro language like Python, it will be a Shake replacement. You can save quartz compositions and use them as filters already but they need to go to the next level and have it part of the workflow. Everything just seems very beta right now and I guess that's partly because of how young GPU computing is but I don't think it was a good idea to drop industry standard software for it.


Autodesk own Toxik though so there's no need to support so many. Combustion was very unstable. Autodesk are the Adobe of the 3D world so just like Adobe discontinued some of the Macromedia apps, Autodesk will refine their lineup by going with the best apps and killing off the others. They also have Autodesk Composite that comes with the 3D apps, which is based on Toxik.

They even used it themselves to do the App Store demo:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFry8geF6LA

It's clearly very powerful for creatives. It's a shame they hide it away in the developer packages.


It still needs to be tried and tested though and it will be years before Apple can get a product to market to rival Smoke, Nuke, Toxik etc and years for the industry to adopt it if they ever do.