Shake vs AE

[jjph]

I am an editor who has been using AE for 3-4 years, as more and more of my work requires compositing and effect work. While AE does most of what I want, I hate the working environment. I recently had a chance to work on Shake 3.5 (very basic job) and found it fantastic to work with and the quality seems better on keying and rotoing.

I want to move to Shake, but need some advice on the differences, and what i will gain or lose moving form AE. I imagine I will use both, but I don't want to spend years learning Shake, if it's not worth the it.

I do mainly commercial work and the occasional animations.

Any unbiased comparisions would be great

[nanuk]

Hi,
i really understand, that you hate AE. I hate it too. I know it is a powerfull program but the gui is ..... . I do Combustion instead of ae. But i also do Shake. In my oppinion if you have to do real compositing jobs, with keying, rotoskoping etc. Shake is the right tool. But if you need motion graphics with typo animation etc. AE will do better. Don´t forget about the fact, the ae does not rasterize vector data like illustrator files. And features like that are very usefull, if you are doing screen design or stuff like that. So check want you have to do and then choose the tool. But there are other tools as well. Combustion, Digital Fushion, Nuke. Perhaps you should test these tools as well. I don´t mean, that you have to do all the apps, but find "your" app.

Greetz Nanuk

[eltopo]

Hi. I am also considering moving from AE to Shake. What I found is that the motion graphics are not that great. What I am thinking of doing is (if you are on a Mac) buy Motion and/or a cheap 3D Illustration Program such as Strata 3D pro to do the motion graphics. and combine then in Shake.

I suggest Strata because id very much like Illustrator, so the learning curve is very fast.

[nanuk]

I have not tried the colabo between shake and motion. And i did not realy try motion. But perhaps that is a way to do motion graphics "with" shake.

Greetz Nanuk

[netviper]

shake can be a great motion graphics tool if you really know what you are doing.

Its not easy for the AE guys to jump over. Motion is the item to fill the gap.

The reason why shake is great for all items is becuase its node based. It can achieve any effect with patience., UNFORTUNATELY the tv biz rarely allows for patience.

THings need to go super fast... Shake is also great for doing illustrations. TO EXPERIENCE USERS.

ive done some cool stufff with it.

[nanuk]

Shake is a great tool, no doubt! But i never heard of it as motion graphics tool. I think that is why Apple brings Motion in. Not the only reason, but a very good one. As I said, I hate AE, but what is realy cool in that app: it does not rasterize vector data! There is a workaround to do the same thing in combustion, but less comfortable. But even this couldn´t convince me to use AE. I rather do the workaround in Combustion. But i will try the Motion/Shake colabo. If i understand this "Motion thing". :lol: It´s kind of strange. But perhaps you can work with it, if you turn off all that preconfigurated stuff and get down to keyframe animation.

Greets Nanuk

[jjph]

This is great stuff. Thanks. Just what I needed to hear. I haven't tried Motion either, though the demo of ver 1 sucked, and so i never looked back. But I did see a demo of the new one, and it looks easy for the standard stuff.

I feel right at home with the node environment, and think I will focus on Shake,, with AE as my backup. Had to do some biulding site dust yesterday with AE. Can Shake do dust?

[netviper]

shake is good, BUT

for what your looking for..

Digital Fusion or Fu5 is really what you want.

its far superior in many areas.

Im not a reseller.. i teach all of them... but the truth is:

http://www.eyeonline.com/Web/EyeonWeb/default.aspx

[Wayne_]

Any unbiased comparisions would be great

I just bought Shake after working with AE for about 7 years now. I've done everything in either DV or web resolutions, but also just bought an HDV camera/deck, too. (Woo hoo, I'm moving on up.)

I'm thinking of writing a blog-ish entry describing the roadblocks and advantages an AE user runs into, but to summarize after a couple of days of playing with Shake (I know, a short time to learn a new tool, but also things are fresh in my mind):

* You can use all kinds of precomps in AE to get a pale imitation of Shake's node-based approach, but there's really no comparison: Shake kick AE's butt in that department.

* Shake doesn't do very much of anything automatically for you. It really is oriented towards getting a workflow down, creating macros, editing .h files, etc, to customize it to the way you work. More customizable than AE, but a brand-new Shake installation will take a lot more clicking, dragging, and wiring to accomplish basic tasks that you take for granted in AE.

* AE's text handling wins hands-down. Shake's Text effect is very minimalist, and appears to be mainly designed for burning comments, timecode, etc.

* Shake does not include a particle system.

* The previous two points, plus some others, lead me to believe that Motion may be a good companion to Shake. Do straight-forward motion graphics in Motion, and do more compositing-oriented stuff in Shake. Where necessary, combine the two: particles, replicators, and text from Motion, the rest in Shake.

(CAVAET: My experience with Motion is somewhat limited. I have noticed that it is REALLY designed to operate in real-time and if it cannot -- due to project complexity, machine speed, etc -- the user experience degrades, both in terms of convenience and also reliability. I'm chalking some of my negative Motion experiences up to using it on an older dual G4 with an older graphics card. Motion's interface is not yet as polished as AE's, though it particle systems, replicators, and libraries of pre-made effects, plus its ability to do at least some amount of work in real-time, have me really liking it.)

* [CORRECTION: Since I posted this I tried it again. You can't trim QT files, though you can loop them, per the manual. You can time remap them, too. Not sure why it didn't work for me when I originally tried it.] Quicktime files are second-class citizens in Shake. You cannot do any time-based manipulation on them: no trimming in/out, no time remapping, no frame blending. So you'll have to get comfortable with file-per-frame clips (i.e. a folder of numbered TIFF's).

* Sound is something of a second-class citizen in Shake as well: you can import a video file that includes audio, but that does not bring in the audio. You can import audio separately and see waveforms, etc, but the audio is not associated with a video clip.

* Shake has two keyers and can easily manipulate mattes. Shake easily wins on that one, though I sorely miss the Composite WIzard set of (third party) plugins for AE.

* Speaking of which, Shake includes the equivalents of several AE third-party plugins. It has Keylight, like AE, but also includes Primatte. It includes tools similar to RE:Vision's Re:Flex (warp/morph) and Twixtor (use optical flow analysis to create morph-ish betweenframes for super-slo-mo), though I don't know how they compare to these two tools quality-wise. It also has a lens warper (a simplified warp plugin designed for handling lens distortions), a flow-based image stabilizer (in addition to the tracking-based one), and a panorama-assembler (like Photoshop's tool for auto-assembling and warping multi-shot panoramas), etc.

* I'd say that Shake is for video/film what Logic is for audio/music: VERY complex, highly customizable, and very efficient once you know it and have set up your environment.

I thought that since I've used AE so long and the node thing makes sense to me (in theory), I'd just sit down and start playing with Shake. BZZZTTT. Wrong answer. I love what I see, but so far I've read through the reference manual twice, the tutorials twice, then worked through the tutorials and after two days I feel ready to test the waters on a real project, though at first I'll be working at 1/3 the speed I'd do in AE.

* Shake's macros/groups/etc will make customization much easier than the workarounds I'd come up with in AE for saving favorite multi-filter, multi-layer, nested-comp, recipes, such as a "film look", a DV greenscreen setup, etc.

* Shake has some inconvenient things, like its interlace on/off control that globally affects the workspace and also rendering. (At least that's my understanding on Day Two.) Maybe I'm crazy, but I work in non-interlaced mode in AE but render interlaced and it's convenient that there are two separate controls.

* I really like Apple's batch/networked render capability (Compressor, FCP, and Motion use it) and assume that's the "Qmaster" that Shake can also use. (AE's batch render is nice, but...) And if you feel comfortable using the UNIX commandline, you can do all kinds of cool things in Shake from scripts, etc, without ever having the GUI launch.

* Shake's RAM preview and disk preview are separate applications (which automatically launch and are pretty seamless), which means that they don't use up Shake's RAM, so if you have more than 2 GB of RAM that's a big win for Shake.

* Shake's keyframe curve editor beats out AE by a longshot. Load multiple curves from multiple effects into one screen and edit away, with several kinds of curves to choose from. (Perhaps AE's different types of keyframes is a more flexible system, though?)

* Shake's shapes are more flexible than AE's.

* Shake has an annual maintenance contract, which I assume is about as much as the cost of the AE Production Bundle. Gets you great (I assume) support and free updates for a year. Not sure if you get zero updates without a contract or if there's a threshold (i.e. 4.0.3 is free, but 4.1 will cost you). On the other hand, AE's not been updated very often lately.


Whew, it's getting late, and I'm getting fuzzy. Hope that helps a little bit.

[vincelapince]

Any unbiased comparisions would be great

* Shake has two keyers and can easily manipulate mattes. Shake easily wins on that one, though I sorely miss the Composite WIzard set of (third party) plugins for AE.

I sorely miss too the Composite Wizards, specialy the Miracle Alpha Cleaner...