Apple Shake

~ the obit ~

vfx compositors used shake. that was not my crowd. i work the other end of the image-processing pipeline, where the inputs are sensor frames from a drone and the goal is to extract objects in real time, not to build a believable orc army frame by frame on a render farm in wellington. shake's audience were the people in dimly lit suites who knew that "premult" was a verb and who had been doing node graphs since the days of nothing real's original irix workstation builds.

shake started at nothing real in 1997. arnaud hervas and allen edwards built it for unix workstations and shipped first on irix at silicon graphics prices, then later on linux. it was a node-based compositor in the same lineage as discreet's flame, just cheaper and more programmable, which made it the choice for the new wave of vfx houses that grew up around the lord of the rings trilogy. weta digital used it heavily. ilm leaned on it across star wars episode iii. you can find shake's name in the credits of half the major vfx films of the decade, from king kong through the dark knight.

apple bought nothing real in february 2002 and immediately cut the price. the mac version landed at 4,950 dollars, which felt like a giveaway against the irix-era seat prices and meant smaller post houses could finally afford shake. for a few years the strategy worked and apple looked like it cared about the pro market. then in april 2006 apple announced shake would not have a major update again. development effectively stopped. they kept selling existing licenses until july 30, 2009, when shake came off the online store with no replacement product. the team had been folded into the final cut studio side of apple by then.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was used for ~

shake was the program where the integration happened. once a vfx house had cg renders, plates from set and matte paintings, somebody had to combine them so the seam did not show. shake was where that work happened on the high-end weta and ilm projects of the early 2000s. peter jackson's lord of the rings used it across all three films. king kong used it the year after, and the matrix sequels had used it before that. shake never had the consumer footprint final cut had, but in the rooms where compositors actually worked, shake was as recognizable as photoshop was at a design agency.

~ what really happened ~

apple's 2006 announcement was the real end. shake kept getting sold for three more years because there was no transition path. apple suggested motion as a partial replacement for some compositing tasks, which was not a serious answer. nuke from the foundry was the actual successor in the market, and it picked up the vfx-house contracts shake had been losing for a few years already. by 2010 most of the studios that had been on shake were on nuke. apple did not put another pro-vfx product into the catalog and did not, as far as the credits show, miss being there.

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