Apple Announces Shake 2.5 for Mac OS X

July 22 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) today announced Shake 2.5, the industry-leading compositing and visual effects software, available for the first time for Mac OS X. Shake has been used in the production of over a hundred motion pictures including the past five winners of the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects: Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Gladiator, The Matrix, What Dreams May Come and Titanic.

"Shake is the industry's most advanced compositing software used by major motion picture studios and leading visual effects houses," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. "Shake 2.5 joins an impressive roster of best-in-class applications, including Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, Adobe PhotoShop, and Alias|Wavefront's Maya, that are helping make Mac OS X the ultimate digital film and video production environment."

"Shake is deployed facility-wide as the primary compositing software at Weta Digital," said Scott Houston, Weta Digital's CTO and long-standing Shake customer. "We couldn't have done Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, without it."

Shake is high-performance compositing software designed for large format productions. Shake features the fastest rendering engine on the market, an extensive and mature compositing toolset and an imaging architecture that simultaneously supports multiple bit depths and provides superior image quality. Shake 2.5 adds an improved image input, a disk-based proxy system and the ability to limit the rendering process to a portion of an image for quicker processing.

Pricing & Availability
Shake 2.5 is scheduled to be available in August for Mac OS X, Linux, IRIX and Windows through Apple Authorized Pro Film Resellers. Shake 2.5 will be available for Mac OS X for a suggested retail price of $4,950 (US) with annual maintenance of $1,199 (US), and for Linux, IRIX and Windows for a suggested retail price of $9,900 (US) with annual maintenance of $1,485 (US). Existing Shake customers will be given the option to double the number of their existing licenses at no additional cost by migrating to Mac OS X.

Shake 2.5 for Mac OS X requires Mac OS X version 10.2 "Jaguar," 256MB RAM and is designed to run on the following Apple products: Power Mac G4, PowerBook G4 and Xserve. A full list of Shake 2.5 system requirements can be found at http://www.apple.com/shake.