Shake's interface takes a little getting used to, but your patience is rewarded.

 

Apple's Shake has long been an effects-compositing powerhouse - so good that it's regularly used to conjure up eye-popping scenes for movies such as The Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Caribbean. But now, with version 4.1, Shake is no longer the tool that only fat-cat Hollywood effects shops can afford. Originally priced at $2,999, the new Shake (a Universal app, no less) now costs only $499 (OK, you can stop rubbing your eyes in disbelief). Shake is roughly half the price of competing compositors such as Adobe's After Effects 7 Pro Edition and Autodesk's Combustion 4. Shake's new, lean price makes it a nearly irresistible proposition - if you can see past a few quirks.

 

Shake has an impressive lineup of hardcore compositing tools. For starters, it offers two powerful keyers (keying is the act of removing an element of an image from its background), Keylight and Primatte, which can be used individually or together to minimize common keying headaches. Among many other things, Shake's keyers can pull a sharp key from a poorly lit green or blue screen, can successfully isolate frizzy hair, glass, and other hard-to-key elements, and can also remove green or blue tints that have spilled off a screen and onto your actors. Of course, you'll find similar tools in other compositors, but Shake delivers them at a lower price.

 

Shake also lets you composite 2D images in 3D space, creating a sense of depth between one element and another. It's easy to tag elements for 3D treatment, arrange them in 3D, and then move a virtual camera around the world (along with simulating camera-lens behaviors such as focal length and depth of field). You can't add 3D light sources and shadows (you can in After Effects and Combustion), but you can match camera moves created in 3D apps such as Maya.

 

You'll also find a full-fledged motion tracker, which, among other things, is handy for mapping an image onto another moving image (say, slapping an advertisement onto the side of a bus). An image stabilization feature called Smoothcam can take appreciable camera shake out of footage while keeping the final image remarkably sharp. Likewise, Shake uses optical-flow technology to smoothly speed up or slow down footage, or convert it to slow motion, with an image quality that seems on par with the best results found in high-end plug-ins for other compositors and is way ahead of what Final Cut Pro manages.

 

 

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But these core features really only scratch Shake's surface. Beyond them, you'll find world-class color correction, vector paint tools, spline-based morphing and warping, a comprehensive scripting language, expressions, macros, a plug-in architecture, and so on. Also, Shake features some basic (if slightly clumsy) integration with Final Cut Pro, in that you can send individual clips from your Final Cut timeline to Shake for compositing, and then see the final rendered result automatically carried back to your Final Cut timeline.

 

Still, what's most important about Shake isn't its bag of features, but its out-of-the-box approach to building composites. Other compositors such as After Effects and Combustion build shots by placing layers of footage on a timeline and then applying different effects to some or all of the layers. It's a familiar approach if you've used a video editor such as Final Cut or a layer-based image editor such as Photoshop. But in Shake, you create composites by building what's called a node tree, which works a bit like a flowchart. Each of the visual elements in your scene (actors, props, backgrounds) is represented as a node on the tree, as is each effect you want to apply to those elements (chroma key, color corrector, blur). Making a composite is simply a matter of connecting one node to another in a logical order.

 

For simple compositing work, a node tree may seem no better than a layer-based approach, but when your composites become more complex, Shake's workflow really shines. Take a quick glance at your node tree, and you can intuitively see how even an intricate composite comes together, one node at a time. The tree also makes it quick and easy to find specific nodes, edit them, rearrange their order in relation to each other, isolate them so you can see their solitary effect on your composite, and insert new nodes into the workflow. Simply put, it's a great way to work.

 

Despite all this, Shake does have a few chinks in its armor. For one thing, it has virtually no type controls or predesigned type-effect libraries (unlike After Effects), so if you want to do motion-graphics work, you'll have to import rendered text from other software. Shake also doesn't have its own particle generator, although you can create particles with Apple's Motion software and then import that unrendered project directly into Shake.

 

Shake's main weakness is its strange user interface, which feels like some alien concoction straight out of the land of Unix workstations (in fact, that's exactly where Shake got its start, years ago). It's not that Shake's interface is bad; it's just unlike any other Mac interface you've come across, so you can't use what you already know from other applications to hit the ground running in Shake. For example, to bring in a still picture or video clip, you can't just choose an Import command from the File menu, as you might expect. Instead, you have to add a File In node to your node tree, which then opens a file-selector dialog box. Likewise, to render a movie, there's no familiar Export command; you have to place a File Out node at the end of your composite and assign it a destination on your hard drive.

 

 

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Shake has more of these weird little nuances, and while you'll certainly get used to them after a few days, they'll definitely make the initial learning curve steeper. It's also tough to acclimatize yourself to Shake when you've been away from it for a few weeks or months - though chances are that if you're using an app like this, you're going to use it full time. It's an unfortunate contrast to an application such as After Effects, which is easier to learn because it fundamentally behaves like other Mac apps, whereas Shake is really an island unto itself.

 

The bottom line. If you can spend the extra time to learn The Shake Way, you'll definitely be better off. Quirky interface or not, Shake gives you a lineup of world-class, battle-tested compositing tools, and all for a relative pittance. No other software, on no other platform, even comes close.

 

Shake represents each image clip and each operation you might apply (chroma key, filter, image stabilizer) as a node. Just arrange the nodes to build your composite.

 

COMPANY: Apple
CONTACT: 408-996-1010, www.apple.com
PRICE: $499
REQUIREMENTS: Mac OS 10.4.6 or later; 1GHz or faster processor; 512MB of RAM; 1GB free hard drive space; graphics card with minimum of 32MB RAM; three-button mouse; AJA Kona or Blackmagic DeckLink card required for preview on broadcast video monitor.
Tons of high-powered compositing tools. Great price. Runs well on MacBook Pros.
Un-Mac-like interface. 3D compositing lacks lighting effects.

 

 

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BONUS TIP: Get Your Shake On

Shake isn't the type of application you buy and dive right into, thinking you'll just figure things out. You'll need some assistance. Here are some Shake guides that we like.

 

- Gnomon Workshop Shake Bundle

$300, www.thegnomonworkshop.com
The ultimate path to Shake enlightenment, the Bundle delivers over 18 hours of high-quality Shake training on DVD. You can also buy the individual DVDs within the Bundle separately.

 

- Peachpit Press Apple Pro Training Series: Shake 4
$54.99, www.peachpit.com
This book teaches Shake through clear, step-by-step lessons and DVD project files. Once you get comfortable, Peachpit also publishes the Shake 4 Quick-Reference Guide ($24.99), which acts as a map to nearly every imaginable feature.

 

- CreativeCow.net Tutorials
Free, www.creativecow.net
A handful of free tutorials, presented via Web videos, focus on specific Shake tasks such as stabilizing a shaky camera shot or morphing. Search the Cow's tutorial library to find your options.