By Beam Tracer (Beamtracer) (198.142.206.222) on Wednesday, February 06, 2002 - 11:43 pm:

This is a bit off topic, but relevant to all Mac users.

Apple has purchased the software company Nothing Real, who make the amazing compositing application Shake. This should have huge ramifications around the film and television industries.

Anyone who owns or has seen a demo of Shake will know of the mind blowing effects it is capable of. Most high-end 3D work gets processed through a compositing application, and Shake is extensively used in big budget Hollywood films. 3D animators should keep a close eye on Apple Shake.

Now, Nothing Real really isn't real, as the company is closed down, and the staff moved to Cupertino. The first thing that Steve Jobs does after acquiring the company is to kill the Windows version of Shake. It's becoming a habit these days. The first thing he did after acquiring Final Cut Pro from Macromedia was to kill the Windows version of FCP. The staff are now focused on bringing out Shake for OS X.

Apple's Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro are killing their competition. Will the same now happen with compositing applications? Apple's plan is to always sell the software at a lower price that the masses can afford, but then sell more units, thus making more profit. Discreet especially should be worried.

At the very least it'll probably cause the price to plummet (Shake currently costs over US$10,000). It will also force many companies doing high-end visual fx for film and television to bring Macs into their workflow. This could have a back-flow effect if they want to standardize on one platform. If they MUST use a Mac for compositing, they may also decide to use it for other tasks. There are many companies that wouldn't use any other application as a substitute for Shake.

Hopefully Apple Shake will result in ultra-high-end compositing software at a low price for all Mac users. It should also hasten the trend of film & television to become cottage industries. Steve Jobs is obviously aiming to make the Mac the eminent machine for digital content creators. Being the head of Pixar, he should be aware of what is required.

Maybe he'll next turn his attention to 3D. Buy Lightwave, kill the Windows version. Sorry I'm just stirring.

By harlan (Harlan) (24.234.81.22) on Thursday, February 07, 2002 - 12:59 am:

Stir away my friend...I tend to agree!!! ;)

Harlan

By arthur argote (Archiea) (66.32.20.234) on Thursday, February 07, 2002 - 01:43 am:

Now if only Apple could buy Newtek and take over LW and Aura development on the mac!!!!

Sory, i couldn't resist..

Seriously, though, I've used shake for close to two years. As good as the core of the software was (fast engine, clean comps, modular tools), Shake had alot of problems regarding Memory leaks and interface glitches and interface performance. their resources seemed spread thin. Sound familiar?

Nothing real was a company just waiting to be bought. They had a great idea, a great approach, (solid core engine first, interface second), and some smart people. they just lacked the programming resources to release a polished product. Their Tremor product seemed like such a cosmetic response to Combustion as opposed to a serious solution to Shake's various interface problem. Such lopsided develpment distracts the growth of the software, and it seemed like in an adolecent limbo. Maybe know with Apple's deep pockets and marketing engine, "iComp" will be a reality....

By Beam Tracer (Beamtracer) (198.142.216.125) on Thursday, February 07, 2002 - 04:04 am:

Shake will get a new start with the port to OS X.

The computer press still haven't cottoned on to all this. Let's see how long it takes them to wake up.

By Kevin F Stubbs (Kevinfstubbs) (213.106.132.58) on Thursday, February 07, 2002 - 06:13 am:

"Apple's plan is to always sell the software at a lower price that the masses can afford,"

Come again ! Apple's plan appears to be to buy up companies selling/producing better products than theirs for Windows, shut them down and force people to move over the Mac as they have no alternative. Lowering prices hasn't entered the equation. When Apple bought up Spruce, the price of DVD authoring software on the Mac did not come down and an awful lot of users had the option of buying high quality affordable software taken away from them. If you have to buy a complete new computer system so you can run a piece of software, then it isn't cheap.

Mr Jobs needs to be careful about his current business practices or he may fall foul of US legislation. Removing users choices and options is contrary to the thinking behind the current laws.

By ~@~ (Phong) (66.52.180.128) on Thursday, February 07, 2002 - 07:03 am:

It's early, this is off the top of my head, and I may or may not have heard:

Combustion will be leaving the Mac.

Run FCP 3.0 under 9.2.2 on a 'dual gigger', for a short, until some X fixes are looked into.

Forward looking:

Despite the ups and downs of X and the G series, and having helped on the freeBSD 64 bit development project, I look forward to a MacQuad with most of the bugs 'ironed' out.

(imo) We are the beta testers of X and Nobody pays us to do this

By Ted Lee (Tedlee) (139.76.65.131) on Thursday, February 07, 2002 - 07:55 am:

While Apple is far from the industry leader in low prices, they do have a track record of buying companies who make great niche products and making them affordable.

Some examples are WebObjects, acquired in the NeXT merger. NeXT price : $30,000 - Apple price $799. Pretty big price drop.

Also, DVDStudioPro, which I believe was acquired from Asarte, used to cost around $3000, now Apple sells it for $999.

I would bet the farm that Shake is going to be used to accent Final Cut Pro in some way, shape, or form.

I doubt SJ has to worry about US legislators coming after Apple for limiting users options. Microsoft does it daily, and even under their cloud of DOJ suspicision, seem to get away with it 99% of the time. Remember Halo? It was to be a Mac/PC game, until Microsoft bought Bungie, and made the game an X-Box exclusive.

The truth is 9 times out of 10, Windows companies buy a Mac only product and make it PC only. The other 10% of the time it happens the other way.

I think it's great. Apple now has FCP3, AE 5.5, LW 7, all running under OS X, and very soon, Shake technology.

By Kevin F Stubbs (Kevinfstubbs) (213.106.132.58) on Thursday, February 07, 2002 - 10:22 am:

I think SJ and Bill Gates are from the same school of business tactics. They both do whatever they can getaway with But that's life !

By Daryl Cornutt (Dfc) (24.29.119.12) on Thursday, February 07, 2002 - 12:12 pm:

I think Apple will use the resources from the Shake purchase in FCP. Makes sense. An answer to the upcoming Avid DV Xpress for OS X.

Just think about it...with FCP's color correction/RT..etc..and add Shake compositing technologies right inside FCP. Shake it all up...and you got yourself one killer app.

Thats all just a guess on my part.

But, it makes sense as far as current product directions. I guess they "could" put out a seperate "ishake" program.

By Beam Tracer (Beamtracer) (198.142.204.76) on Thursday, February 07, 2002 - 05:23 pm:

Avid DV Express was actually an answer to Final Cut Pro. It's Avid's attempt at a software only video solution, and they're about 2 years too late. Avid is bleeding as FCP takes sales away from it. I believe that Avid's SoftImage 3D division is also running at a loss.

Steve Job's style isn't exactly like Bill Gates'. Microsoft never bothered to acquire WordPerfect or Netscape before destroying them.

Digital Producer magazine has just posted a very critical analysis about the Apple/Nothing Real takeover.
http://www.digitalproducer.com/2002/02_feb/editorials/02_04/apple_nothingreal.htm
The guy mentions Mac Lightwave as a "niche market". He's wrong there. When Lightwave 7 was released, the Mac sales were greater than Windows sales. This is not niche.

By Sam Easterling (Sam) (24.196.27.91) on Thursday, February 07, 2002 - 08:12 pm:

I see nothing underhanded business wise here. Apple is bringing "high-end" software to the masses. I think it is great. It is actually creating competition. I'm sure Adobe is not real happy about it. Bottom line is better tools at lower prices for us. Just another step in the desktop revolution. And as for Apple buying Newtek, nah, Alias/Wavefront would be more like it. Wouldn't surprise me a bit. While we are wildly speculating, maybe Steve will roll up some of Pixar's tools into a commercial package. Actually a Mac port of Renderman would be nice.

By adam stern (Adam) (24.69.255.204) on Friday, February 08, 2002 - 09:15 am:

"While we are wildly speculating, maybe Steve will roll up some of Pixar's tools into a commercial package. Actually a Mac port of Renderman would be nice."

I'll second that....Maya's great, and seems to run nicely on osx. But until renderman or another high quality rendering solution is available on the mac, it makes no sense to use Maya on the mac for film/tv work. We really feel trapped between a rock and a hard place here. We're so frustrated with lw/newtek that it's becoming a running joke at the studio to blame it for everything from the coffee machine not working to bad traffic getting in in the morning...but we can't switch to something else yet because all of our 3d cash is in lightwave and we haven't seen a viable complete package alternative yet.

grrr.

I'm hoping with the faster g4's running gf4's, and an UPDATE for lightwave, we can remain where we are, and be happy about it.


adam

By Sam Easterling (Sam) (24.196.27.91) on Friday, February 08, 2002 - 03:21 pm:

I know how you feel Adam. Newtek's silence doesn't help either. It would be nice if in response to users they would say "here is what we are working on". We are waiting either way, atleast then we wouldn't be in the dark. I doubt very seriously they have any top secret ideas to implement that other products don't probably have already. I understand not wanting to give release dates, but for such a small, dedicated market it seems like they would want to be in closer touch with their users. I'm also currently looking very seriously at Maya, however the render solution is holding me back as well. I have a feeling we'll see a major price cut in Maya pretty soon. If Pixar would just port Renderman. Maybe we all need to write Steve a letter. I have a feeling it is coming though. It sounds like Apple is very interested in taking advantage of OSX UNIX underpinnings. I think the Shake aquisition is just the first major sign, or maybe it was the hiring of Kerris (I believe is his name) from Alias/Wavefront.

By tim anderson (Tim) (66.26.96.229) on Friday, February 08, 2002 - 03:57 pm:

pardon my ignorance...
but when you speak of mayas render solution,
are you talking about render quality?
or a net work render feature(render farm)?

By adam stern (Adam) (24.69.255.204) on Friday, February 08, 2002 - 04:08 pm:

Sam,

I agree re: shake and the hiring of Richard(?) Kerris...these moves bode well for fx and post work on osx. Looking forward to seeing what happens in the next while.

And I totally agree that Newtek should at least let us know what's going on re: fixing stuff... even if to say 'we're working on the problems'. The *real* problem is that it seems to take 1000 users moaning and a few sacks of hammers before anyone from Newtek admits feature X doesn't work on the mac. See my conversations with Arnie re: .rla files. "this is broken". "No it's not". "Here's a screenshot". "oh. yes, it is broken, but it's fixed in 7". "No, it's not." GGGAAWWWWWWRRRRR!!!!

This is absolutely ludicrous. I think Chuck does an incredibly admirable job of trying to keep the masses at bay, but it's time for some info.

/rant off

Sorry. Tim, I'm speaking of render quality. Maya's renderer is the weak link in the package...on the pc one can use renderman or other solutions.


adam

By tim anderson (Tim) (66.26.96.229) on Friday, February 08, 2002 - 04:29 pm:

thanks for the clarfication Adam.
for 7500 bucks you would hope there would not be any weaklinks...

By adam stern (Adam) (24.69.255.204) on Friday, February 08, 2002 - 04:41 pm:

agreed...the maya renderer seems to be useable, but lw is definitely better. Lightwave, when it's working and not CRASHING in a flurry of bugs (can you tell I'm working to a deadline here and grumpy? blah.) is great for modeling and rendering, and the animation is definitely improving. But maya is powerful. Play with the dynamics for a while and prepare to be blown away. Mess with 'set driven key' functions and MEL and see what lightwave *could* be, but isn't yet. Lightwave, at least on the mac, is great, but only in theory. All the features add up to squat if it doesn't work properly.

I really don't want to do a lw vs. maya thing here. Frankly, the only reason I've started exploring maya is out of necessity - we need a FUNCTIONAL package - and because of the seeming nonchalance Newtek seems to have for it's mac user base. 7500 seems like a lot...but when I add up the time trouble-shooting lightwave and the time I've taken to actually have to *convince* newtek that features are broken...that time could pay for a maya license or two.

adam

By tim anderson (Tim) (66.26.96.229) on Friday, February 08, 2002 - 05:01 pm:

actually you would hope for 2500 you would not get any weak links(sigh)
i have signed up for their "personal learning edition " hoping to get a look for myself.
very interested in the paint effects.and paint geometry...
good luck on the deadline.
tim

By Karl Hansson (Karl) (217.208.2.243) on Friday, February 08, 2002 - 06:29 pm:

Personally I think LW is one of the best 3Dpackages on any platform. Youll get alot for your money. I dont have half as much problems with my Mac LW as you all seem to have. Dont get me wrong, if you say you have bugs ( eh...the LW bugs I mean...;) ) you probably do and those should ofcource, I think, be squashed. Im running LW 6.5 (yes still) on a old G4 450 640mb ram and a 16mb graficard (rage) mac os 9. Of cource things are not lightning fast but most of the features in LW do what they should do without any fuzz. I also use the Sasquatch 1.5 plug in wich also works very well. The only big problem I have is the Impact 2 plug in from Dynamic realities. I crashes LW when simulating, mabe its due to my old grafic card. I have to upgrade my graphic card before moving onto Mac os X and LW7. The only thing to replace my current system is the upcomming G5.

By Beam Tracer (Beamtracer) (198.142.208.231) on Friday, February 08, 2002 - 07:28 pm:

The G5 will completely change the landscape. It will be the first viable mainstream 64bit system (Itanium has been failure). Being first with something that's mainstream, 64bit and works will allow Apple to start conquering the workstation market.


Apart from high-end apps coming to OS X, the 64bit situation will attract more high-end users to the system. Just wait and see. I can't wait to see the comparisons of the 64bit G5 to the other 32bit processors from Intel and AMD.


Whenever software is ported to a new platform, the first releases always have some bugs or missing features. Bit by bit these start improving in subsequent releases.


I personally believe that, on the Mac, Lightwave is a better product than Maya. Lightwave got a bit of a head start in OS X. However, both products will improve as OS X itself gets refined.


I look forward to Shake coming to OS X. If you haven't seen it in action, go to one of the graphics/broadcast trade shows and see a demo.


I could imagine that Apple's purchase of Shake has got Adobe's nose out of joint (again). They're probably stewing in their executive offices right now!

By Beam Tracer (Beamtracer) (198.142.208.231) on Friday, February 08, 2002 - 07:51 pm:

Another report on Shake from the British tech magazine The Register:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/39/23984.html

By Beam Tracer (Beamtracer) (198.142.208.231) on Friday, February 08, 2002 - 08:22 pm:

Digital Producer is taking reader comments on the Shake issue:

http://www.digitalproducer.com/2002/02_feb/features/02_04/apple_nrealreact.htm

Some of the comments are very similar to the ones posted on this furum... they must have been reading ours first!

By outsider (Outsider) (203.164.35.138) on Friday, February 08, 2002 - 08:57 pm:

Let Apple buy 'em out, and while they're at it Apple should buy out Adobe and take photoshop/Illustrator away from pc users, after all those appz don't work well on wintel anyway.

Also, Halo is still coming to mac and pc, M$ just gave x-crap a head start with a release of it exclusively for 6 months.

By Ed Mag (Ed_M) (152.163.207.198) on Friday, February 08, 2002 - 10:39 pm:

[[[pardon my ignorance ... but when you speak of mayas render solution, are you talking about render quality? or a net work render feature(render farm)? ]]]

As in ScreamerNet? Well, regardless of what the programmers at NewTek think of me, I really like their products. At least I *want* to like them. Ever since my first Amiga back in the early 90's I longed for a VideoToaster and LightWave. Even today, I'm considering there wares when I get my new Mac (Photoshop is FIRST on my list). I believe that NewTek is a good company with GOBS of potential regarding the Mac market. There are many more opportunities in the Mac market for them. However, ScreamerNet is a complete catastrophe from what I've heard.

Whether it be from individuals here in these forums, individuals out in the field or individuals posting to other forums, It would seem that ScreamerNet performance on the Mac is lackluster at best. I hope the developers don't think that I'm mocking them or putting them down (I honestly don't mean to be insulting), but I do feel that they are in serious need of a completely new approach with respect to clustered rendering. I'm just concerned.

As I understand it (and please correct me if I'm wrong), ScreamerNet employs SIOUX (a development tool for CodeWarrior [Metrowerks]) I've been told that it's used for Debugging support in CodeWarrior and is a library which provides the standard C/C++
input and output functions in a Mac window. This is then sitting/running on top of carbon and then this is sitting on top of Unix (read: OSX). It really seems like it's been cobbled together. Perhaps the developers at NewTek would be so kind as to provide us with some insight into exactly how ScreamerNet functions on OS X?

Anyway...

I've been keeping abreast of what's been happening in the area of clustered/distributed computing with respect to the Macintosh. Hopefully, NewTek and their developers are too; especially AppleSeed.

The AppleSeed project over at UCLA is AWESOME. I honestly believe that it's only a matter of time before Apple brings "Plug-and-Play" clustering to the desktop and makes it as easy as plugging in your desk lamp or toaster oven. Check out this article and let me know what you think:

http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,50078,00.html

I spoke to Dean Dauger about a little over a year ago and he said it was his intention for the future to seek out Mac developers interested in getting their applications to run across a cluster of linked-up Macs. The AppleSeed approach is VASTLY superior to ScreamerNet and seems like it's much easier to implement code-wise.

If only NewTek can get together with Dauger, This would be an area where Macs would shine. In the very least they should at least contact him for his consultation. We'll just have to wait and see...

BTW, you will notice in the article that Dauger compares and contrasts his Mac clusters with PC/LINUX clusters. In the end, Mac clusters are far more flexible, far easier to implement and provide faster performance. Here is an excerpt:

[[["There's a book called How to Build a Better Beowulf that's 230 pages long and tells you how to set up clusters with LINUX," Dauger said. "We have a one-page manual (PDF) that shows you how to do it on PowerMacs. We've had high school students do it. We've had junior high school students do it. We even had a sixth grader in Hawaii do it." ]]]

You really have to read the entire article.

Macs clusters are more powerful than Pentium clusters and are roughly 230 times easier to setup :-)

--
Ed M.

By -=KrAy-ZeE=- (Krayzee) (142.173.178.184) on Saturday, February 09, 2002 - 12:33 am:

I don't know about your experiences outsider but Photoshop has always worked great on every Wintel machine I've ever used. In fact, at the multimedia company I used to work for Photoshop often performed a lot better on our PC's than on our Macs.

It would be interesting to see what would happen if Adobe did stop developing for PC's though. But I would think that it would decrease Adobe's profits too much, especially now that Apple wants to be their competitor.

By outsider (Outsider) (203.164.35.138) on Saturday, February 09, 2002 - 06:17 am:

Photoshop always is faster on macs and works better if it weren't apple would never use it to benchmark their new systems. Screen redraws and sizing are always slower on pc's no matter what card you have.

By Arnie (Arnie) (65.184.20.249) on Saturday, February 09, 2002 - 11:41 am:

SIOUX is the only real choice for command line apps, like screamernet, under OS9. On OSX, there is a real shell for stdio, so SIOUX is not necessary, or even available. The screamernet renderer functions the same on PCs and Macs, which is to say that it is not trivial to set up on any platform. While the system uses a simple shared directory protocol, most configuration problems seem to lie in getting all the nodes to have matching pref.s so they all have the same plugins, etc. Setting up a renderfarm is not a casual activity.

By -=KrAy-ZeE=- (Krayzee) (142.173.178.184) on Saturday, February 09, 2002 - 12:59 pm:

outsider, as I said before in my experience that isn't always the case, especially when it comes to screen redraws. We had a couple G4-500 and Dell P3-800's and the Dells were a lot faster when it came to screen redraws on large iamges. In fact, one of our die-hard Mac users ended up using a PC for the project. You can show me all the Apple benchmarks you want (it's not like they're going to show their computers being outperfomed by PC's anyway) and you can give me all the Apple propaganda you want, but I'm no OS loyalist so only the facts are going to interest me, and in this case the fact is that Photoshop was running better on our PC's and handled large images a lot faster than the G4's. Sorry if I crushed your fantasy world.

By Harold (Ace) (138.89.109.168) on Saturday, February 09, 2002 - 05:10 pm:

I'm a graphic designer, and we use mostly pc's at work and photoshop along with other adobe products, the pc perfom just as good if not better than the mac counterparts.
It doesn't really matter to me if I use mac's or pc's, but when my company recenlty brough new machines (1 mac and 3 pc's), dual AMD MP1800(1.533Ghz) 1Gig of ram, geforce mx64mb, etc. The mac was dual 800 g4's, with a 1Gig or ram, and a geforce card as well. The price difference between one of the mac's was about 1/3 more than that of one pc's. Don't get me wrong I love Mac's, but seeing how fast the dual AMD chips ran compared to the old pc's and macs we had was a site of pure pleasure, although the dual 800 g4's were faster than the 1ghz pentium III's that we had, the dual AMD chips were just a step ahead of them. It wasn't just photoshop but other programs as well.
I know the G4's have better architeture design in their chips then their pc counterparts, but at some point or another the Megahertz difference between the PC processors and the Mac processors starts to make a difference. But Maybe we will all be in joy when the new G5's hit the market, until that day it seems that pc's are alittle faster.
As to the aquisition of Nothing Real by Apple, I'm curious to see what they will be doing with it. Will it only be a Mac only software? Will the price drop?, even more interesting will be if the price drops significantly, then you have it competing with adobe against after effects. I'm wondering what Adobe is thinking right now.

By Beam Tracer (Beamtracer) (198.142.208.120) on Sunday, February 10, 2002 - 12:20 am:

Now we've come back to our original topic of Apple buying Nothing Real, there's an analysis by David Nagel at Creative Mac magazine:

http://www.creativemac.com/2002/02_feb/editorials/smack86.htm

By Sam Easterling (Sam) (24.196.27.91) on Monday, February 11, 2002 - 05:31 pm:

Adam, just discovered that Mental Ray is now indeed supported under OSX.

By adam stern (Adam) (24.79.122.14) on Tuesday, February 12, 2002 - 07:00 pm:

Sam...woah. Really? Where's the info? off to look around...

thanks for the heads-up!


Adam