Rumor: Shake replacement "imminent"

#1

Appleinsider posted this today:

Apple also has a replacement for its Shake high-end compositing software under development. …expected for delivery in 2008, making its belated delivery appearing to be imminent.

Which raises the possibility of a NAB release. Unless Apple has some really nifty tricks for Phenomenon, it seems like they’re going to be late to the post-Shake party. But bundling a high-end nodal compositor with FCPStudio would put it in a huge number of post houses and keeping the price at $500 with the promise of continued development would make pricing relevant. Anyone think that if Apple does deliver this spring, they’ll have a shot at being a major player? Does this market even make sense for Apple?

#2

The whole reason Shake was being sold for that much was that Apple realized they could continue to get “something” out of it by selling a dead product for a few more years, instead of completely putting it out to pasture.
Combustion is in a similar position. For all intents and purposes, Combustion’s next generation replacement has been on the market for a few years now…Toxic.

Why would Apple develop a totally new “Hi-End” Compositor and sell it for $500? If you believe that, I’ve got a bridge over the Atlantic to sell you. Meet you over at E-Bay?

#3

I can’t see it happening at all. It has easily been 2 years since shake was discontinued and Nuke has picked up the mantle and run with it. It costs a lot of money to build a pipeline around new software, so now that Nuke is becoming standard (on cheaper *nix and Win boxes), it would take an awful lot to go back to a new shake that requires expensive MacPros.

#4

Before the purchase from Nothing Real it was $5k on Windows, Linux and Mac OS’s.

Apple bought it, and dropped Windows entirely, cutting off their largest source of income, dropped the Mac price down to $2,000, making it cheaper to get a Mac AND the Mac version of Shake rather than getting the Linux version.

They were more interested in using it as a tool to sell Mac computers, than developing what was at the time the industry standard under $100k app.

Instead of switching to Macs, Windows users simply bought Nuke or Fusion, and now Toxik as well. Same for a huge amount of Linux users.

Having not sold nearly enough Macs out of this, and the huge drop-off in sales of Shake left Apple unable or unwilling to develop it further. It’s no longer a selling tool for Macs, and given the amount of competition it’s unlikely Apple will try to enter the market at that high a level again. They’d be playing catch-up at this point.

Motion STILL doesn’t sell as well as After Effects, but it’s cheap enough that people can continue to get it as part of their toolset.

#5

Apple doesn’t sell Motion as a stand-alone product: it’s part of the FinalCutPro suite. So I’m not sure how you could compare the two, unless you’re looking directly at FCP vs. AE sales. Nor has Apple positioned Motion as an AE competitor. That’s not to contest your other points, since I don’t know the relevant numbers. Is that speculation, or based on statements from Apple insiders and/or revenue and sales data?

#6

This is it - they were looking at it as a way to get their hardware into high end places but realised they’d make far more money with less hassle selling ipods and iphones - having a load of shake developers costing money when you’ve got a very small market (the post industry is tiny on a global scale compared to mass market stuff) doesn’t make that much business sense.

#7

I know this is nitpicky but I’m just clearing up some incorrect information about history

No, it was 10k when Apple bought it. An osx version did not exist till 9 months after the acquisition. The price ended up being 5k for osx and 10k for linux and 2 years later they dropped it to 5k for linux and 3k for osx.

When Apple bought Nothing Real, Shake had only sold 2500 copies. So I really doubt they we’re buying it in order to sell Macs. They have sold 30-40k copies since they aquired it, way more then NR had for the 4-5 years before. Apple EOL Shake had nothing to do with how many copies sold.

People forget that compositing & 3d is an extremely niche market

Apple has sold 1 million copies of final cut pro as of a year ago, which means they have sold atleast half that of Motion since it has been bundled with it for many years.

#8

Thanks for the informative post, Deke. Did Apple talk about why they bought Shake at the time of the acquisition? The obvious answer would be to get software guys who could develop Motion, assuming that Apple had some idea that they wanted software that does something like what Motion does, but I’m not sure the obvious answer is the right answer.

#9

No, they never talked about why but they we’re acquiring many different applications for their proapps division, so I assume it was to round out their offerings.

As for Motion, that was mainly developed by the ex-Combustion team when Autodesk pulled development from LA and Apple hired them all(NR & Discreet we’re in the same building). Plus some of the Silicon Grail team. Only a few of the Shake devlopers went to work on Motion as far as I know.

#10

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