Shake and Media 100

[Floh Peters]

[Andy Taplin] “I’m using AFX of course and i know it pretty well, what’s the Shake learning curve like with the node based interface?”

Shake is a different beast than AE, and it is designed to do a different kind of work. So depending on your needs Shake may be a very good tool, or it may be simply the wrong system. If you want to do film-class compositing, like putting together multilayer 3D-renders, or if you want to “correct” footage (like replacing something in a shot, doing heavy keying, Rotoscoping or similar) Shake is probably the better tool. On the other hand if you want to do Motion Graphics and design work you are probably much better with AE (the AE/PS integration alone is a big plus there, the AE text tools and overall amount of filters are another).
I am currently doing some work on Shake, and think that once you understand how it works it really is a great tool. But I think the range of projects you can do in AE is much bigger than the one you can (or should) do in Shake.

[Andy Taplin]

Thanks Floh

I think you’re right – motion graphics I’ll still do in AFX but Shake has such a reputation that for the money they’re now asking it seems like it might be worth learning for those things where it’s better than AFX. Chromakeying for example?

Couple of things come to mind:

Can it read the M100 codec?
Can you render out using the M100 codec?
How’s audio handled?

Andy

[Floh Peters]

[Andy Taplin] “I think you’re right – motion graphics I’ll still do in AFX but Shake has such a reputation that for the money they’re now asking it seems like it might be worth learning for those things where it’s better than AFX. Chromakeying for example?”

Shake comes with Primatte and Keylight as keyers. Keylight is bundled with AE7 and Primatte can be bought for AE7. So keying is not rally a reason for using Shake, exept you need to do a lot of roto work as well. But you

[Floh Peters]

Btw, there is a 30day trail of Shake available here.

[Andy Taplin]

Shake’s sounding less and less useful for my usual video work – but I’ll try the trial and pretend I’m working on a feature!

Thanks

Andy