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Comment by watersb | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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