Shake 4.1 : $499
The one thing that I love about Apple is that they are liberating prices for HighEnd Markets. When you have an inside look into the Pro Video Editing World you have a sense of what I am talking about. With the introduction of FinalCut and pricing it below $1000 you can now get a highend editing station for about $8.000 total that is about 100x as capable as a $150.000 AVID system just 5 years ago. AVID has felt the heat the most while their prices dropped considerably as well they have lost about half of their market in less then 6 years - tendency downward. Now Apple is doing it again. After bying the (Film) Industry Leader in compositing application - Shake - they originally priced it at 1/5th the original price - still around $3000 for a mac version - $5000 for a Linux version. This still seems high but we are talking about a Highend floating point perfectly stable compositing app that is used in all of the high end hollywood productions - only rivaled by the discreet line of Apps with the one coming closest to shake costing about three times the price of the Linux version - its a steal.
Now in a surprise move they pitch Shake 4.1 - the new version released today - as a "plug-in" to Final Cut and lower the price for the Mac version to $499. This will create quite a stir in the compositing community and will start a price war that is only benificial to the customers. I dropped After Effects for most compositing work in favor for Shake quite some time ago and can just tell everyone to have a deep look at it - the interface workflow makes a hell lot more sense, its much faster, more precise (tracker must is likely one of the best 2D trackers on the market), integrated network rendering (not through some lame hack ala AE), fully Unix scriptable. Interesting move for sure - now if Apple would do the same it has done with the video market with the 3D market I would be a happy camper indeed (I guess there is no need as they wouldnīt need to rip out the internals of a 3D app to put into one of their own as they did with shake/motion).
A 30 day fully functioning trial is available.
Update: It appears this is the last version of Shake in this form and shape. Apple is planning a complete rewrite of the App to incorporate newest OS technologies. This would likely mean a merger of Shake and Motion (one would hope not) or as "Pro" part that is fully integrated into Final Cut (again one would hope not). Anyway new things canīt be bad and if it means this programm is going to rock even more then all the better.