Apple today announced Shake 2.5 available for the first time for Mac OS X. Shake has been used in the production of over a hundred motion pictures including the past five winners of the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects: Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Gladiator, The Matrix, What Dreams May Come and Titanic.

Shake is high-performance compositing software designed for film production. Shake features an ultra-fast rendering engine, an extensive and mature compositing toolset and an imaging architecture that simultaneously supports multiple bit depths and provides superior image quality. Shake 2.5 adds an improved image input, a disk-based proxy system and the ability to limit the rendering process to a portion of an image for quicker processing.