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AE competitor
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[John Rofrano] “Boris RED includes Graffiti and Continuum Complete functionality so you only need Boris RED. I’m not sure how Twixtor fits in. That’s a retiming tool not Motion Graphics. Actually the latest version of Continuum Complete includes Mocha functionality so I wouldn’t be surprised if the next version of RED has it too.”
Red sounds great on paper – but the interface and real time performance are horrendous.
Ive used it along with MC and as a standalone and its a real PITA.
What you cant beat is the price – for $299 upgrade from an old version of Red(Avid FX) bundled with MC4 you get ALOT of BCC filters, most of the useable stuff bread and butter stuff anyways, and a pretty bad ass titler for next to nothing.
I only am really using it now for the odd BCC filter and blending modes in MC and for that its great.
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[Bret Williams] “They could’ve given away shake.”
It’s funny, Shake was still pretty popular among compositors until fairly recently… maybe two or three years ago? I would be willing to bet that a company like Boris/Imagineer Systems, Blackmagic or Adobe could have picked it up, modernized it and made it great again… if it had been for sale, that is. I still don’t get Apple’s reasoning for killing Shake outright. It was still a viable piece of software that didn’t directly compete with any of Apple’s offerings… why destroy it?
Shawn
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[Shawn Miller] “It was still a viable piece of software that didn’t directly compete with any of Apple’s offerings… why destroy it? “
It’s a product that goes too far down the post-production rabbit hole for Apple, IMO. I think it was originally acquired for parts, prestige, and with the hopes that it would be picked up by a much broader user base. After Apple took the IP from Shake that it wanted, and the potential market didn’t seem much broader than the existing market, is when Apple probably decided that it was Done with Shake. Interesting thing about it is that Apple EOL’d Shake in ’06 but kept selling it until ’09.
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[Andrew Kimery] “It’s a product that goes too far down the post-production rabbit hole for Apple, IMO. I think it was originally acquired for parts, prestige, and with the hopes that it would be picked up by a much broader user base. After Apple took the IP from Shake that it wanted, and the potential market didn’t seem much broader than the existing market, is when Apple probably decided that it was Done with Shake. Interesting thing about it is that Apple EOL’d Shake in ’06 but kept selling it until ’09.”
I don’t doubt that this completely correct, and it does make the decision to kill Shake a bit more understandable – can’t have someone else mining the same IP after all. Too bad, I always wanted to try Shake.
Shawn
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[Shawn Miller] “After Apple took the IP from Shake that it wanted, and the potential market didn’t seem much broader than the existing market, is when Apple probably decided that it was Done with Shake.”
You know what always mystified me: exactly what IP did Apple take?
They were certainly unambiguous that this was the intent. I just looked up the original press release:
“Apple has acquired Nothing Real, a developer of high-performance software for professional visual effects and post-production based in Venice Beach, California. Apple plans to use Nothing Real’s technology in future versions of its products.”
What I mostly heard at the time was that Steve bought it to solve some internal problems for Pixar. THAT makes sense to me. At the time, he was still calling Pixar his “day job,” and it was apparently short money. A multiple of earnings when the earnings were that little?
As is the case with a lot of the acquisitions he did in those days (remember Chalice? Prismo Graphics?), I suspect it was as much about buying the people as anything else. It wasn’t unusual for people to immediately be shifted off the products they founded into other parts of the company.
But is there a PRODUCT that bears the marks of Shake? Certainly not on the UI side. Image processing? I just don’t know.
My guess about selling the product on Macs is that Steve saw it as low-hanging fruit. It was fairly easy to port, people in that market were already using Macs, so why the hell not? Remember, as an inducement to convert from Linux, he offered to double your number of licenses for free.
For that matter, I think selling Final Cut was low-hanging fruit. Remember that his original intent had been to buy a consumer-level product to run on iMacs, and only pursued Final Cut when Adobe declined to license Premiere’s tech. (It has been said that Apple tried to buy Premiere, but I’m pretty sure the pitch was strictly to license tech.)
That’s also why I’ve always felt that Apple didn’t go very far in making Final Cut very Apple-like. It was in some ways the least Apple-like product they ever shipped. Other than some colored dots for minimize/maximize/close windows, the actual interface didn’t change substantially at all.
But hey, Apple was only too happy to take the money. $2 billion in FCP/FCS software sales alone over 12 years was pretty easy pickin’s.
Which is why my reaction to X when I first saw it was, “Ah, THIS is what Steve wanted all along. THIS looks like Apple.”
Or to be more precise, when I saw iMovie, I said, “Ah, THIS is what he wanted all along.” I do continue to suspect that it’s not that Apple doesn’t care about pros — a ridiculous contention, imo — but that, the superlative commitment of the pro development team notwithstanding, as a COMPANY, Apple still considers pros low hanging fruit.
This is ENTIRELY borne out by Nothing Real founder/Shake developer Ron Brinkmann. We actually talked about this at the time, but when X was first launched, he publicly made some observations about Shake that he hadn’t made at the time (what with not wanting to have his family murdered while he watched).
(My emphasis added.)
After the acquisition I remember sitting in a roomful of Hollywood VFX pros where Steve told everybody point-blank that we/Apple were going to focus on giving them powerful tools that were far more cost-effective than what they were accustomed to… but that the relationship between them and Apple wasn’t going to be something where they’d be driving product direction anymore. Didn’t go over particularly well, incidentally, but I don’t think that concerned Steve overmuch… 🙂
Nothing particularly controversial about that, I hope — but I can imagine the shock at the time for a bunch of VFX pros who’d relied on Shake to be told that their needs would no longer be the ones driving development, when in fact their original love for Shake was driven precisely be the product absolutely being tailored to meet their needs.
And in fairness, why would any constituency pleased by a product that meets their needs in a stellar and comprehensive fashion NOT be pleased to hear that those needs would no longer be driving development?
Ron continues,
And back then the same questions were being asked as now – “Doesn’t Apple care about the professional market?”
In a word, no. Not really. Not enough to focus on it as a primary business.
Again, nothing controversial here. Ron does indeed qualify his “not really” by emphasizing that pros weren’t driving Apple’s PRIMARY business, and surely nobody here disagrees.
As he observes, my emphasis added,
Before Apple bought Shake, customer feedback drove about 90% of the features we’d put into the product. But that’s not how Apple rolls – for them a high end customers are high-bandwidth in terms of the attention they require relative to the revenue they return.
I hope that nobody here will argue that we as pro users are not a pain in Apple’s ass at least occasionally. LOL
Not meaning to go too far down this rabbit hole, I do think his observation about all this in the context of his experience developing Shake, and then selling it, is very interesting, and worth a read. Five years later, still pretty relevant…if admittedly most interesting to ME as filling in the historical record. Here ya go.
Which still leaves my question — do any of you know where Shake’s tech wound up in the Apple ecosystem?
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[Tim Wilson] “Which still leaves my question — do any of you know where Shake’s tech wound up in the Apple ecosystem?”
Well, quite! Apart from optical flow, which subsequently made an appearance in Motion, I can’t see anything that fits the bill, despite the fact that we hear this notion repeated pretty frequently. And even optical flow – did Apple really need to “borrow” this from Shake? I don’t know enough about the commercial history of this, but I’m far from convinced that it was a proprietary Shake feature that couldn’t have come from somewhere else.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
[Tim Wilson] “do any of you know where Shake’s tech wound up in the Apple ecosystem?”
I thought Shake’s optical flow technology made it into Motion via their camera stabilization effect… I could be wrong though. 🙂
Shawn
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[Shawn Miller] “I thought Shake’s optical flow technology made it into Motion via their camera stabilization effect… I could be wrong though. :-)”
I could be wrong too (!) but I think we had optical flow in Motion before they introduced the stabilisation option.
Simon Ubsdell
tokyo-uk.com -
[Tim Wilson] “You know what always mystified me: exactly what IP did Apple take?”
I think Shake’s implementation of Optical Flow and SmoothCam were probably the two most well know. How many ‘smaller’ things found their way into Motion I have no idea.
[Tim Wilson] “My guess about selling the product on Macs is that Steve saw it as low-hanging fruit. It was fairly easy to port, people in that market were already using Macs, so why the hell not? Remember, as an inducement to convert from Linux, he offered to double your number of licenses for free.”
Apple also kept the Windows license the original price ($12k or $15k, I can’t quite remember) even though the Mac license eventually went down to $500.
[Tim Wilson] “That’s also why I’ve always felt that Apple didn’t go very far in making Final Cut very Apple-like. It was in some ways the least Apple-like product they ever shipped. Other than some colored dots for minimize/maximize/close windows, the actual interface didn’t change substantially at all.”
In the early/mid 2000’s Apple was all about the brushed metal look and FCP fit in with that. All the iApps from that era (iTunes, iMovie, iDVD, iPhoto) had a matching visual style as did DVD SP, Compressor and QT 7 Pro. FCP never got a facelift, but that’s probably because by the time the facelift was needed they knew they were going to start from scratch anyway so why bother?
[Tim Wilson] “Nothing particularly controversial about that, I hope — but I can imagine the shock at the time for a bunch of VFX pros who’d relied on Shake to be told that their needs would no longer be the ones driving development, when in fact their original love for Shake was driven precisely be the product absolutely being tailored to meet their needs.”
This is what I meant by Apple not wanting to go too far down the post production rabbit hole (too much effort for too few users). I thought about bringing up Ron Brinkmann’s post as a case-in-point, but every time I have it’s turned into a firestorm. 😉
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[Tim Wilson] ” but that the relationship between them and Apple wasn’t going to be something where they’d be driving product direction anymore. Didn’t go over particularly well, incidentally, but I don’t think that concerned Steve overmuch… :-)”
I think this quote from Ron is the quintessential difference between Apple’s relationship to “pros” compared with Avid or Adobe. This is quite obvious in how the interaction has been between Apple and the “Focus”/”WTF” film team versus Adobe and the Fincher/Miller/Coen teams (“Gone Girl”, “Deadpool”, “Hail, Caesar!”).
Namely that Apple’s software is the off-the-shelf version without any direct, active support of the ProApps team. They are happy to provide some level of BTS assistance and reap the marketing benefits, but they don’t provide any active assistance, such as software modification. They may or may not study the experience and learn things that they can adapt into future builds, but nothing they would ever admit to as a direct outcome.
Conversely, the Premiere team is directly involved with those filmmakers providing some direct engineering assistance and custom builds. This provides a direct link between things learned in the trenches and and actual features that find their way into future versions.
Avid used to do the same, but Media Composer is pretty thoroughly baked so there’s less of a chance for those sorts of incremental changes. In the old days Avid product designers would actually drop in on key customers with notepads and study the pain points caused by the software in given situations. This resulted in to-do lists for the software team. Some of those folks are now on the FCPX team. That might still happen, but it is certainly less visible and those involved will almost always publicly deny it.
Whether it is true of not, the impression certainly is there that Adobe’s tools (AE, Premiere, etc.) were vetted by real world customer input, whereas Apple’s tools (FCPX, Motion, etc.) are more like the tablets descended from on high by the software gods. 🙂
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com
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