Apple Announces Shake 3.5

MARKHAM, Ontario—April 20, 2004—Apple® today announced Shake® 3.5, featuring new shape-based morphing and warping tools for advanced compositing and new “shape shifting” special effects. Designed for major motion picture studios and leading visual effects houses, Shake has been used in the production of every Oscar-winning film for Best Visual Effects over the past seven years, including this year’s winner “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.” Fine-tuned to take advantage of the incredible performance and architecture of the Power Mac® G5 and Mac OS® X version 10.3 “Panther,” Shake 3.5 provides an efficient and effective workflow for visual effects artists.

“As high-resolution formats like HD become commonplace in post-production, Shake is the production proven product for delivering quality, speed, openness and affordability for resolution independent visual effects,” said Rob Schoeben, Apple’s vice president of Applications Marketing. “Apple has integrated shape-based morphing and warping, the most highly sought after features for our users, directly into Shake 3.5, making these advanced features even easier to create.”

The new shape-based morphing and warping features in Shake 3.5 use industry standard spline tools, making it more intuitive to create and modify effects than with traditional mesh-based warping tools. Morphing and warping further enhance Shake’s visual effects tools, including layering, tracking, rotoscoping, painting and color correction.

Shake 3.5 also improves upon the Rendezvous™ enabled Shake Qmaster network render manager that can now handle distributed rendering tasks for both Shake and Alias’ Maya, allowing visual effects artists to easily distribute rendering tasks across a cluster of Apple’s Xserve® G5 servers or desktop Power Mac G5 computers for maximum performance and efficiency. With the addition of support for 16-bit RGB and 10-bit YUV QuickTime® formats, Shake 3.5 ensures that the highest quality image is always maintained whether exchanging media with Final Cut Pro® HD or archiving entire sequences.

Shake 3.5 features one of the fastest resolution independent software rendering engines on the market, with production proven visual effects tools and a compositing architecture that supports multiple resolutions and color bit depths simultaneously without compromise. With Shake 3.5, visual effects artists can selectively choose which operations process at 8-, 16-, or 32- bit floating color bit-depth, allowing high dynamic range images to be composited with greater fidelity while still maintaining high performance. Shake 3.5 also includes the industry’s leading keyers, Photron Primatte and CFC Keylight, to achieve the best results.

Shake 3.5 offers unprecedented integration with Apple’s suite of professional applications, including Final Cut Pro HD, Apple’s Emmy award-winning editing software; Motion, a breakthrough new application that redefines professional motion graphics production; DVD Studio Pro® 3, a professional DVD authoring application; Soundtrack, the innovative music composition tool; and Logic® Pro 6, the standard in computer-based music production.

Pricing & Availability
Shake 3.5 is available immediately for Mac OS X, Linux and IRIX through Apple Authorized Shake Resellers. Shake 3.5 will be available for Mac OS X with unlimited render licenses for a suggested retail price of $3,899 (CDN), and for Linux and IRIX for a suggested retail price of $6,699 (CDN) with annual maintenance of $1,999 (CDN). A full list of Shake 3.5 system requirements can be found at 102.p.syniva.es/ca/shake.

Apple Canada Inc. is headquartered in Markham, Ontario and is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Apple Computer, Inc. Apple products are available at more than 450 Authorized Apple Canada Dealer locations across Canada.

Press Contact:
Tara Hendela
Apple Canada
(905) 513-5853
[email protected]