Never used SHAKE, I had a question before I buy

Question

Never used SHAKE, I had a question before I buy

I'm a Combustion user. Discreet was the company that made it, that later turned to Autodesk. It seems after so many years that Combustion may have been dropped, so now I'm looking for a program that can offer much of what Combustion had to offer. Does anybody here know if SHAKE is a Combustion type program for the Apple world? Or, besides After Effects, is there another program that will work with Apple that's close to Combustion?

Thanks for any info.

Dual 2.5 GHz PowerPC G5, Mac OS X (10.5.8), FCP 7.0.2

Posted on Sep 15, 2010 8:53 AM

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Answer 1

Sep 15, 2010 11:56 AM in response to Adam The Texas Sicilian

Shake is a reasonable replacement for Combustion.
It's like you're in Schematic View all the time.

Combustion is stronger in motion graphics and particles,
but you can do that in Motion, so with FCS you've got
that covered.

Since Shake is EOL'd Nuke is gradually taking its place.
For complex compositing, AE's timeline interface (like Motion's)
is more difficult to work with than Shake's (or Nuke's)
nodal interface.

The big advantage of Shake is that it's a serious
major league compositor/effector without the serious price.
It works great in Snow Leopard, and it's one of the few
Apple apps that supports multiple cores!

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Answer 2

Sep 15, 2010 1:07 PM in response to Adam The Texas Sicilian

The problem with Autodesk (used to be Discreet) was they make these fabulous programs. *Edit , *Combustion. Then they realize they made them so cheap, but they're as good as their other high end programs, that they start losing money. Then they drop the products when all of us loyal fans and customers spent so much time and money on them.

I'm glad you said what you did about Motion. I have noticed that with Motion and After Effects you can do a lot pretty close to what you could with Combustion. And now with your confirmation of NUKE.. hopefully I can learn all 3 well enough to not miss Combustion. I loved that tracker and Z space in Combustion. But Z space is common place now I think. Haven't worked with AE CS4 enough to know how well the tracker works yet.

Sorry my post is all over the place I'm all hyped up on super caffinated coffee and ephedra right now.

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Answer 3

Sep 15, 2010 2:17 PM in response to Adam The Texas Sicilian

I've used Combustion, but pretty much everything I did in it I can now do with Shake and Motion. It had some nice things with particles that I still keep asking for in Motion - like Particle Reflectors, but overall I'd say I'm more productive with these tools than I was with Combustion...

If you take a look at my Visual Effects reel (click on the Visual Effects button), two effects were done in Combustion. The bluish shot of sad people, and the shot of the radiator boiling over. All the rest were done in FCP, Motion, and Shake...

Patrick

P.S. I'd also venture to say that AutoDesk wasn't losing money to their lower end product range, rather they feared they would, so they crippled them and made sure that Combustion wouldn't be competition for Flame/Smoke/etc...

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Answer 4

Sep 15, 2010 2:36 PM in response to Patrick Sheffield

Thanks Mr. Sheffield,
As you can tell I'm posting a lot getting answers here and there to get more comfortable and better prepare myself for more Apple programs 🙂

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Answer 5

FloridaJo

Level 1

114 points

Oct 21, 2010 8:24 PM in response to Adam The Texas Sicilian

Just be aware Shake is no longer supported by Apple.

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