———— 21 November 2008 ————

Apple has shocked the compositing world, releasing an update to their generally presumed-for-dead nodal compositing app Shake.

You can download the Shake 4.1.1 pdf here. If you’re new to Shake and / or nodal compositing, check out Andrew Shanks’ Shake tutorials at the Creative Cow.

Also included in Apple’s Pro Applications Update 2008-04, FCP updates to 6.0.5, Compressor to 3.0.5, and Color to 1.0.3.  You can read all about it here.

Some more exciting aspects include XDCAM 422 and RED plug-in support in Color and improved high-precision rendering in FCP.  Yay, RED footage grading!

For all you cautious early-adopters (and rightly so!), Charles Vanderpool on the FCP-L donned his guinea pig halloween costume.  He reports:

Everything’s working fine so far. (Knock on Clone) FCP & STP good to go. No Color test yet. Too short a deadline to use it currently.

As always, I recommend waiting to upgrade until you have a business need and you are NOT in the middle of a current project.

proactively • dusting off noodles in my node tree • peter

———— 21 April 2008 ————

There’s an interesting (and, to any credible news source, baseless) thread picking up momentum on the fxshare shake listserv with the subject heading Next-gen shake.

Not that a lack of credibility or baselessness has ever stopped me from speculating, the least I can do is bring you a bit of listserv lurkage:

Ean Carr started off the thread with the seemingly harmless question Any news?

A follow up response from Greg Morgan invited more discussion:

Not that I know of. Apple is being their usual tight lipped selves. Which, in this market is going to hurt them I think. A lot of places, it seems, are moving away from Shake because of it.

Eddie Offermann offered up a well formed retort, noting

It’s vacant hearsay since Apple is using their usual secretive development strategy and draconian nondisclosure agreements. Last thing I heard was that they were slipping on their 2008 delivery schedule. Early 2009 now.
I agree that it’s a mistake to be tightlipped with clients that make buying decisions that will not only allow them to choose different software but possibly hardware that Apple’s new product might not run on at all. A tech demo of the new product would be nice, even if they did nothing but say “Look, shiny! Not available until 2009.”

And in typical listserv fashion, most discussion veered off in reference to that silly DirecTV percentages commercial. But not to be taken totally off track, Randy Little chimed in with kindling for the embers:

I hear its in beta but I hear that those that would really know would be murdered for saying. Really just hearsay. I haven’t seen it I haven’t heard directly. Just rumor mill bs that means ZERO.

If anyone out there believes in the saying All rumors are based in fact (or whatever it is) eat your heart out.  Otherwise, check out Creative Cow’s Shake tutorials and realize how badass this app already is in its current generation.

proactively • keeping my fingers on the pulse • peter

———— 10 April 2008 ————

For those of you who don’t know who Ron Brinkmann is, check out his blog here. Mr. Brinkmann was cool enough to include a few pages pre-release in pdf format. Awesome.

His new book will be a must have for the remaining Shake users out there, as well as all the Nuke, After Effects, Cinema 4D, and Motion people as well. New spells for the spellbook, indeed.

Thanks to Deke Kincaid for the heads up on the fxshare newsletter.