Shake goes Universal, priced at $499

by Peter Cohen, Jim Dalrymple, MacCentral

Apple on Tuesday announced the release of Shake 4.1, a new version of its pro video compositing software. What's more, the company announced that Shake's price has been dropped from $2,999 to $499.

"We wanted to make Shake accessible to our 500,000 Final Cut Pro users out there," Kirk Paulsen, Apple's Senior Director Pro Applications Marketing, told Macworld . "At $499 we have really priced Shake in the range of a plug-in for Final Cut Pro."

Shake features 3D multiplane compositing, 32-bit Keylight and Primatte keying, Optical Flow image processing, integration with Final Cut Pro 5 and a scripting language. It's used by television and film pros to incorporate advanced visual effects into their work.

The new Universal Binary release runs natively on both PowerPC and Intel-based Macs. Apple said that Shake 4.1 delivers performance boosts of up to 3.5 times on a 17-inch 2.16GHz MacBook Pro compared to a 17-inch 1.67GHz PowerBook G4.

"It runs amazingly fast Intel Core Duo machines -- it perfectly complements the MacBook Pro," said Paulsen. "The MacBook Pro is the fastest notebook out there for content creation -- it is the ultimate content creation machine."

Shake 4 can be upgraded to Shake 4.1 for $49.

Paulsen also said that Apple is working on the next generation of motion graphics applications and noted that the company would no longer sell the Apple Maintenance Program for Shake — current Maintenance customers are encouraged to contact Apple by e-mail if they have questions.

Update: Added information from an interview with Apple executive. 12:33 pm 6/20/06

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