'Shake' Design Documents | Hacker News Reader

'Shake' Design Documents

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I loved Shake so much when I was an undergraduate that I attempted a very-over-ambitious node driven digital compositor as my senior capstone project. I learned Python and Qt just so I could build its GUI (my first non-trivial GUI program). It was able to perform basic compositing operations on streams of TIFF images, including 16 bit depth TIFF which I was quite proud of at the time. All the heavy processing logic was written with C extensions.

When I went to graduate school I got a better offer for doing scientific computing work instead of graphics, so that was the last major graphics project I attempted. It was also the most complex native GUI I ever worked on, because by the time I was out of school "Web 2.0" was in full bloom.

Thanks for dredging up very happy memories of when I was still trying to combine computers and creative expression.

So awesome! I had a similar reaction to Shake—I first created an ANSI C command-line based compositor that read in and interpreted scripts. A year or so later I abandoned it in favor of a Mac app with a node-based GUI that compiled down to GPU instructions that I brought to market with a partner.

Also just want to highlight Ron's book The Art and Science of Digital Compositing, which is valuable to this day!

I bought The Art and Science of Digital Compositing at Powell's Technical Books in Portland a year before I started my capstone project. It and Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice 2nd Edition in C were my main references.

There was much less open source code to look at back then, and it wasn't as easily searchable either. Working on graphics, I could usually (though not always) resolve an ambiguous directive by trying different approaches and looking at the output. Does the result look like colored snow? Does the whole image now have a magenta tint? I probably need to try a different interpretation (or just fix my bug).

For those with an archeology bend, here's what the UI ended up looking like:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=ymv_0AtOMbE

Keep in mind that this was software built in the 90's

To be fair, development continued into the mid-2000s.

Wikipedia article on Shake: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shake_(software)

I remember getting a cracked version of Shake in high school and using the optical flow stabilization on mini-DV footage for the dumb videos my friends and I made. Worked amazing for the time.

We made a mini horror film, Donnie Darko style, about a crazy uncle drugging a bunch of his nephew's friends. The scenes where a character was under the influence were whatever crazy color grading and effects I could squeeze out of Shake without deep knowledge. Great times.

One of my favorite UIs of all time. Inspired a then-20 y/o to have a career building complex UIs =)

It was also fun. The "Reveal" icon is a guy who opens his trenchcoat when you roll over it.

Missing the late Peter Warner, designer.

Fun historical note: When Steve Jobs flew the Shake team up to Cupertino, he came to lunch for a meet-&-greet. He sat down and said some things; among them was, "Yeah, you guys built this cross-platform UI that looks the same on every platform... but we have people here who know more about UI than you ever will."

Needless to say, the Shake UI remained intact for the rest of its days.

People were shocked, SHOCKED, that we weren't willing to use the apple-standard file browser. I had the hardest time explaining to them that users would rather see something like "filename.1-2000#.tif" instead of, you know, 2000 individual filenames...

My all time favorite! I did my 10000 hours with Shake before it was discontinued.

With hindsight it’s maybe good idea to learn few different approaches to doing any task. Being an expert in any particular software is risky as things get discontinued all the time. Lucky that Ron’s book, the manual and the actual software exposed the underlying theory really well so I actually had learned a bit about compositing as well over the time I used Shake.

Incredible. I'd never think I'd ever be able to see this kind of historical artefact. NR Shake was so brilliant :)

Did 'Shake' become the 'Motion' app for Final Cut?

I have a sim recollection of purchasing it around the time that Apple was absorbing things, but apparently my memory of Apple tech history has been subject to bit rot.

Not really but they’re loosely related.

Apple did discontinue Shake and released Motion.

Some of the technologies that were part of Shake (optical flow retiming for one) were included in Motion and Final Cut Pro X but very little of what made Shake, well Shake, carried over.

I think Steve Jobs was always kind of pissed that he couldn't get away with dumbing-down Shake. But when your clients are Peter Jackson's WETA, and ILM, you're not going to be able to put Lord of the Rings and King Kong on your homepage (which Apple loved to do) if you cripple their primary effects tool.

And in addition to the companies you mention, there was also Pixar, which of course he was also running. He was probably even more pissed that Catmull wasn't willing to dump all of Pixar's Linux machines and use Macs :)

No. Some of the retiming stuff that was added to Shake later was also added to Motion/FCP. But the whole point of Motion was to leverage GPU power to produce swoopy, polished-looking motion graphics with minimal keyframing and rendering. And at that it excels. It was built mostly by the former Effect team from Discreet, after Apple brought the whole team in; right after Shake & team.

I created some commercial-grade (or better) DVD menus with Motion back in the day. Even now if I have to prepare some kind of glossy promo for something, I use Motion.

But for the ultimate quality I always turned to Shake. I knew it wasn't doing anything dumb that would degrade the image.

This is correct. The Shake team and the Motion team shared office space but other than maybe some very tiny bits of code-sharing (like the retiming mentioned), the Motion app was built entirely by the guys that came over from Discreet.

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