FCPX and Shake vs FCPX and Motion

[Brian Mulligan]

Shake has been dead for like 12 years. It may still be around in some places, because it was a good program. It will in no way interact with FCPX. Motion and FCPX play very nicely together.

Nuke is the compositor replacement for Shake.

Brian Mulligan
Senior Editor – Autodesk Smoke
WTHR-TV Indianapolis,IN, USA
Twitter: @bkmeditor

[Andy Neil]

[Brian Mulligan] “It will in no way interact with FCPX.”

Well, to be fair, it interacts in the same way that After Effects interacts with FCPX. You’d have to export from FCPX to get into Shake, and you’d have to Export from Shake to get into FCPX.

Motion is far more intuitive than Shake is, though less powerful in the compositing arena. I’ve used Shake before and while I was able to do things with it, I never worked with it comfortably.

Andy

https://www.timesavertutorials.com

[Ian Bailey]

Hi Sam,

I was a big fan of Shake before it was killed off and used it for all my compositing work. However, it took a lot of hard work and a great deal of time to learn it properly. Why do all that for a dead app?

My advice would be to learn FCPX and Motion thoroughly and see if they fulfill your requirements. If you need more specialist vfx software you might want to consider plugins such as Conduit Suite or maybe a separate app like After Effects.

Ian

[Ben Scott]

theres was a product i heard of called foolcut not sure if it works with 10.0.3 yet it does fcpx to after effects and from what I tried it did a good job of translating things

to get to shake I would say the xto7 product from https://assistedediting.intelligentassistance.com/Xto7/
would get you back to fcp7 and then from there you could probably do a send to shake

not sure if reselling any apple product is legal, check the agreement but most software isnt actually resellable

I would ask whats needed from shake

if its nodal compositing then look to nuke or even something like the updated blender if opensource and free is what you are after, heard good things about the updated version

if nodal compositing is needed you could also look at conduit plugin for motion

motion can do a lot of what is needed

its a shame at the moment that theres no export to motion from fcpx

[Sam Kuper]

Thank you for all the helpful replies and opinions so far.

I should have mentioned at the beginning that the fact that Shake is no longer supported by a manufacturer doesn’t bother me particularly, because Shake is:
– by all accounts very capable and reliable
– well documented, with plenty of tutorials available.

The learning curve for Shake doesn’t bother me particularly, either. Its node-based editing system looks quite comprehensible, judging by the video tutorials I’ve seen.

As far as video is concerned, I don’t think I’m willing to manage more than a pair of programs for editing and compositing/rotoscoping/FX, so I’m ignoring plug-ins at the moment.

It does sound as though Motion 5 + FCPX will offer a smoother workflow than Shake 4.1 + FCPX, but how much smoother? I’d be grateful if someone could detail the steps necessary to round-trip from FCPX to Motion 5 versus the steps necessary to do the same from FCPX to Shake 4.1. Are there any particular concerns I should be aware of (is this still a problem, for instance)? I’d also be grateful to know of any specific capabilities (other than the ability to edit with a nodal interface, obviously) that I would lose by using Motion 5 instead of Shake 4.1; and vice versa.

Thanks again.

PS. Nuke is an order of magnitude more expensive than the price I would have to pay for Shake. It is well beyond my budget.
PPS. I do not own FCP7, so I was puzzled by the suggestion that Xto7 might be useful for me. Have I misunderstood that suggestion?

[Daniel Rutledge]

I would get both. Motion 5 is only $50. I never got that deep with Shake, mainly because it was killed early on when I started learning it. It is a great program, but it is 32 bit, so a lot slower. Also, as time goes by, you may find that your OS and hardware may not fully support it. There are also probably some odecs you cant work in already. I would lean towards motion for those reasons. Ultimately, if you are just getting started in motion graphics and compositing, the tool you learn on isn’t that important. I started with Aftaer Effects and when I decided to try Motion for some things, it was very easy to translate skills. Shake and Nuke were a little harder to switch to because they are node based as opposed to layers. But I usually managed to do what I wanted because concepts translate pretty universally.

[Ian Bailey]

Hi Sam,

It’s certainly the case that Shake is very capable and there is still training material available. However you will encounter problems as OSX and QuickTime are up-dated (which will benefit FCPX and Motion) and Shake won’t handle new video formats. I would suggest you talk to people on the COW’s Shake forum regarding these issues and the gamma shift bug you linked to.

If node-based compositing is your thing then I would suggest you take a look at Blender. Although primarily for 3D animation, this free app has a node-based compositor and a camera tracker built-in. The developers are very active and there are regular up-dates. You’ll find online tutorials covering compositing and rotoscoping in Blender.

There is now the SendTo app for extracting tracks from a FCPX XML to send to Motion: https://bit.ly/yp43Ta
But without that, going from FCPX to Motion and FCPX to Shake are quite similar. You would export your shot from FCPX as a video file or an image sequence and then import into Motion or FileIn to Shake.

Converting to an image sequence will be a more reliable option for Shake if you’ve shot in a new-ish format. But you can’t yet import an image sequence into FCPX, so you’ll need to export from Shake as a video file or as an image sequence and then convert in Compressor.

Motion is aimed at creating titles and on-screen graphics, whereas Shake is for people wanting to build cinema quality vfx. Their purposes are different, but they have a number of tools in common. What you will mainly lose by using Motion instead of Shake is the very fine control of colour channels. For example, if keying with 4:2:0 or 4:1:1 footage I would usually do the following in Shake:

– Convert the shot to YUV colour space
– Slightly blur the U and V channels to reduce blocky artifacts
– Convert it back to RGB ready for keying

You are unable to do this in Motion. Having said that, the new Keyer in both Motion and FCPX appears to be very good, so might not require this pre-processing.

What you will lose by using Shake instead of Motion is a whole load of pre-built content, pre-built behaviours, a variety of effects, the particle and replicator systems, the integration of templates and widgets with FCPX.

Ian

[Sam Kuper]

Ian, this was extremely helpful; thank you.

PS. If adopting Shake, I’d probably freeze my system at Snow Leopard, which I was thinking of doing anyway, so Shake’s (potential) incompatibility with later versions of OS X shouldn’t be a problem.

[Andy Neil]

[Ian Bailey] “What you will mainly lose by using Motion instead of Shake is the very fine control of colour channels. For example, if keying with 4:2:0 or 4:1:1 footage I would usually do the following in Shake:

– Convert the shot to YUV colour space
– Slightly blur the U and V channels to reduce blocky artifacts
– Convert it back to RGB ready for keying”

Although, on the up side, Motion 5 has a pretty amazing built in keyer that may be as good or better than Shake’s legacy one (from Primatte IIRC).

Also, Motion is only RGB space, but it DOES give you individual channel controls. There are channel mixer and channel blur filters available for that kind of work.

Andy

https://www.timesavertutorials.com