Shake on a Mac Mini (seriously)

The integrated GPU in the Mac mini is probably going to be the limiting factor. If you can't justify a Mac Pro, I'd suggest you consider an iMac Core i5 or Core i7. Either of those would run rings around your G5 while not being as expensive as a Mac Pro. Even the Core 2 Duo iMac with the ATI Radeon GPU would be a significant improvement, over either the G5 or the Mac mini, if you can't justify the Core i5 or Core i7 units.

Someone else here may be able to report real-world performance with Shake. If it's Intel-native, and I could be wrong but I don't believe it is, the increase in performance for Shake may not be that great since it will have to run in PPC emulation. Final Cut performance, though, should improve significantly as long as you have a current version.

Regards.

Dave Sawyer wrote:
If it's Intel-native, and I could be wrong but I don't believe it is, the increase in performance for Shake may not be that great since it will have to run in PPC emulation.

Version 4.1 is Universal Binary, so it runs on Intel Macs.

Thanks, Jon. I couldn't remember.

Mike, Shake 4.1 has always been multithreaded, and can use up to 8 threads (in turn it fills out 8/16 logical cores while rendering on my machine). You can choose the number of available threads in the Globals tab or define the number of threads to be used in the screen that comes up before any sort of render.

The reason you can choose to use less threads is because more threads = more RAM needs simultaneously, and when I'm doing something crazy like using the Warper to straighten out a 100 megapixel panorama, I have to render using just one core or the render will come out without the Warper having been applied.

Mike Kwiatkowski wrote:
If not, I hope this is not the end for Shake. I'd love to see Shake with a touch interface -- with all the noodles, camera angles, and sliders, I think it would be a great candidate for a touch UI.

I don't know how to break this to you but Apple cancelled all development on Shake in June of 2006.