Shake Usability Question

[user_deleted]

hello. i am a Cinematographer (fresh out of film school) and love playing with the image on my Mac. I also design film titles as a hobby. I have been toying around with shake a bit and was wondering about its usability as a motion design tool. i mostly use a combo of Macromedia Freehand, Photoshop, FCP, Flash, Combustion.

However I am extremely attracted towards Shake and its power. But am a newbie...

What I want to know is the feasibility of doing most or all of my work from all of the above apps within Shake itself.

1) How easy/difficult is it creating new vector shapes (squares, ovals, lines, hexagons etc) in Shake? The Quickpaint tool doesnt seem to have basic geometry tools, but 'pen' tools. (shake 3.5)

2) i would like to move things around the canvas with the need of a 2d transform node. is there something i am missing/overlooking? liek Photoshop: Select and drag around?

3) Am i foolishly tryng to find Combustion/Smoke kind of tools within Shake? Or are these apps interchangeable?

can someone show me the light?

[user_deleted]

I think that you are looking in the wrong direction. Shake is a dedicated high end motion compositor. Can I suggest you look at motion? I have never used it but i understand that it does what you want.

[user_deleted]

hello. i understand Shake is a high emd compositing tool. but motion graphics is compositing as well. you composite layers and layers of graphics and images and add effects, motion, transitions tec. i use motion as well. but i really appreciate the power of shake. and the ability to output at any res you want... what do the users think?

its like, photoshop is also a high end compositing tool. and we also use it for graphics...AND finishing...

also, would you replace Smoke for Shake? How useful is Shake for 'finishing'?

[user_deleted]

what exactly do you need of the "power" of shake for? it is really good for building really complex composites out of tens or hundreds of elements, but it's not terribly convenient (to say the least) for keyframing.

if you really want, you can do pretty much everything in shake, but some things (such as motion graphics and animation work) is much easier with other packages. your best bet is prolly after effects.

++ christoph ++

[user_deleted]

you are probably right... its terribly inconvenient that way...

[user_deleted]

Motion graphics isnt compositing, it is motion graphics. I use layers when I make a graphic in illustrator but I am not compositing. Let me be more precise: Shake is a tool which is focussed specifically at people who are in the business of integrating more than one moving picture element (whether flimed or rendered) so that they apear to be shot by one camera.

Photoshop is not a "high end compositing tool" it is a general purpose (and very useful) raster image editing and creation tool.

Finishing is a term used in the braodcast post production industry and generally defines a process of tweaking and polishing an online conform before broadcast. It might include small edits, retiming footage, graphic inserts, titles, simple compositing, wire/rig removals, color grading, etc. Photoshop is not used for finishing. It has no timeline and ability to conform an EDL, it also lacks the sophisicated color tools of most finishing systems.

Smoke is an editing system made by Discreet Systems. It differs from more standard editing systems in the fact that it features a bunch of finishing oriented tools derived from Flint/Flame/Inferno. Shake is not an editor it is a compositor (see more precise definition above).

Finishing is a very loose term but if you mean "can shake be used as a stand alone tool to replace commonly used finishing systems in traditional broadcast post production pipelines" then the answer is no.

[director]

You seem versed in using Adobe Photoshop. For a 1/3 the price of Shake you can pickup Adobe After Effects. It's awesome for motion graphics, it's made by Adobe so It has a somewhat similar language, and best of all you can pick it up quickly. ...the basics at least.

I had the most success from starting with some light reading ... "Classroom in a book" for After Effects. If you follow the lessons you can't fail at getting down the basics. Send me any other questions you might have.

Thanks!