Compositing Software Now Only $499

Apple today announced the delivery of an upgrade to Shake, but new features in this update are not the story, but rather the drastic price reduction – from $2,999 to $499 – making this high-end compositing software available to virtually anyone.
The first question that pops out at this news is, what is Apple thinking?
"We're thinking about the half million Final Cut users that can now take advantage of the tight integration with Shake," says Kirk Paulsen, senior director, professional applications pruduct marketing at Apple. "At this new price, we see Shake as becoming a universal tool for almost every Final Cut user. This is not a stripped-down version of Shake, this is the full version with all the tools and features."
While many have no need for the high-end tools in Shake that companies like ILM use every day on projects like Mission Impossible III, Poseidon and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, there are a number of simpler tools that most will find valuable, like re-touching, stabilization, re-timing and tracking.
"Shake uses optical flow image analysis that analyzes every pixel of the frame and applies a motion vector to it," notes Paulsen. "So when we do re-timing in Shake, something as simpler as taking a 30 fps video clip and turn it into 120 fps video clip. In Shake the optical flow will actually build new frames so it looks exactly like it was shot with an overcranked camera. It's not a blending of the frames or repeating of frames. So it's little things like the re-timing and retouching that we think will be used most often by Final Cut editors
Shake 4.1 has also been optimized for performance gains on the new Intel-based Mac. "At NAB I was running Shake with 2K plates of King Kong on a Mac Book Pro with no problems. Not to long ago, that type of work used to be loaded on a huge tower of computers," notes Paulsen.
Shake 4.1 is now available now anbd owners of Shake 4 can upgrade for $49.
www.apple.com