[inkaudio]

You don't get the "prosumer/pro-but-non-top-10-blockbuster-movie-editors" without being in the pro apps business. Moreover their pro apps fit the focus of the company, a high end creative company. It's hard to market pro apps to aspiring professionals and prosumers if pros are not using it. Part of Apple's marketing campaign for their pro apps is to show how pros are using their software.

[cageface]

Apple is no longer a "high end creative company". Their business now is making pretty, easy-to-use devices for non-techie consumers. They just happen to still have this vestigial organ hanging off the side.

[daeken]

I don't quite understand why they don't spin their pro apps off into their own company.

[aschwo]

Exactly! If they had done this before killing off Shake, I bet we'd still have a half decent competitor to Nuke in the high end compositing space, instead of nothing.

Instead, Apple killed Shake and let big studios buy the source code from them so they could continue to use it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shake_(software)#History

[a4agarwal]

Apple used the Shake team to build Motion, an application which a much larger user base.

[mathnode]

What? Shake was THE node based compositing app!

There is a massive difference to Motion and the highend compositing apps like Shake, Nuke, Fusion, Softimage(Illusion+Matador=FXTree), Houdini(COPS), Flame, Toxik(Autodesk Composite). After Effects and Combustion are time-line based like Motion, but Motion doesn't begin to compare to them. Even Blender has fantastic compositing tools.

Shake was serious business. It's last well known big project was 'The Dark Knight' which Framestore CFC mangled a 64bit wrapper around it to better manage the 8k-frame workload. Shake was ported to Intel, then killed off, with no intention to take it to 64bit. I don't think you can buy the source code anymore.

[aschwo]

The Foundry is absolutely kicking everyone else's ass with Nuke. They have an interesting business model as well: don't do much research in house, instead work with studios with big R&D budgets and license their tools when they're mature, bringing it to a wider audience.

They've done it with Digital Domain and Nuke (compositing), Weta and Mari (3d paint), and now Sony and Katana (lighting).

[mtw]

pretty much everyone is on After Effects these days instead

[mathnode]

Shake was the king. But now the industries have Nuke. The king is dead long live the king!

[InclinedPlane]

Apple isn't so terribly different from other companies its size, it still has empire-itis. There is a fundamental inability of leadership to spin-off parts, to reduce the size of the empire.

[DrJokepu]

You mean something like Claris? Because that didn't quite work out (although it's still alive).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claris

[InclinedPlane]

Quite so. "Prosumers" typically over-buy, they buy equipment with capabilities beyond what they would ever need. Often they buy the same equipment as professionals. If the professionals are using something else, prosumers are likely to follow.