[HN Gopher] 'Shake' Design Documents
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       'Shake' Design Documents
        
       Author : ingve
       Score  : 36 points
       Date   : 2024-05-14 19:38 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (digitalcomposting.wordpress.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (digitalcomposting.wordpress.com)
        
       | agumonkey wrote:
       | Incredible. I'd never think I'd ever be able to see this kind of
       | historical artefact. NR Shake was so brilliant :)
        
       | djtriptych wrote:
       | One of my favorite UIs of all time. Inspired a then-20 y/o to
       | have a career building complex UIs =)
        
       | code_biologist wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | philipkglass wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | turnsout wrote:
         | 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!
        
           | philipkglass wrote:
           | 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).
        
       | ur-whale wrote:
       | 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
        
       | watersb wrote:
       | 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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       (page generated 2024-05-14 23:00 UTC)