In 1996, Arnaud Hervas and Allen Edwards founded
Nothing Real, and released Shake 1.0 as a command-line tool for image processing to high-end visual effects facilities in early 1997. Emmanuel Mogenet joined the R&D as a senior developer in the summer of 1997 as Shake 2.0 was being rewritten with a full user interface. In the fall of 1997, Dan Candela (R&D), Louis Cetorelli (head of support) and Peter Warner (designer/expert user) were added to the team. After initially working as a consultant in early 1998, Ron Brinkmann also joined in early 1998 as a product manager. This core group was all among the original
Sony Imageworks employees. Shake 2.0 was first shown at the 1998 NAB conference as an alpha demo with a minimal set of nodes, a node view and the player. A more complete beta version of Shake was shown at the 1998 SIGGRAPH conference. Version 2 was released in early 1999 for
Windows NT and
IRIX, costing $9900 US per license, or $3900 for a render-only license. Over the next few years, Shake rapidly became the standard compositing software in the visual effects industry for feature films. In 2002,
Apple Computer acquired Nothing Real. A few months later, version 2.5 was released, introducing
Mac OS X compatibility. To strengthen the Mac's position in production studios, the Mac version held a price of , and users of the non-Mac operating systems were given the offer of doubling the number of licenses at no extra cost by migrating to Mac OS X. In 2003, version 3 of Shake was announced, which introduced the
Qmaster software, discontinued support for Microsoft Windows, and allowed unlimited network render clients at no additional cost. A year later, the release of Shake 3.5 at the
National Association of Broadcasters show saw the price drop to $2999 for Mac OS X and $4999 for Linux and IRIX. In April 2005 Apple announced Shake 4 at a pre-
NAB event. New features included 3D multi-plane compositing, 32-bit Keylight and Primatte keying,
optical flow image processing (time-remapping and image stabilization),
Final Cut Pro 5 integration and extensions to their open, extensible scripting language and
SDK. Shake 4 had no IRIX version. At the NAB event in April 2006, Apple announced that Shake 4.1 would be a
Universal Binary version and would ship in May that year. It was actually released on June 20, 2006 and was rebranded as a companion for
Final Cut Studio; as such, its price was dropped from $2999 to $499 for Mac OS X but remained the same for Linux. At the same time, Apple announced that they would end support for Shake. Rumor web sites claimed that Apple was working on a next-generation compositing application codenamed Phenomenon. Existing maintenance program subscribers had the option to license the Shake source code for . Shake's final release, version 4.1.1, was issued in 2008 to make it compatible with revised Apple 16-bit QuickTime codecs that used a different byte order (
Endianness) than they had previously. On July 30, 2009, Apple removed Shake from its online store and website. Shake had been officially been declared end of life status 3 years prior but continued being sold in the Apple Store for $499 until that time. The Shake website now redirects to Apple's Final Cut Pro X website. == Uses ==