Apple MA434Z/A User Manual - Page 23

An Overview of the Shake User 1 Interface 1 This chapter provides a fast introduction to all aspects of the Shake graphical user interface. It also provides indepth information about navigating the interface, and customizing it to suit your needs. Opening Shake When you open the Shake interface, a blank Shake script appears. Shake scripts (otherwise known as project files) are unique in that they're actually a text document containing the command-line script representation of the node tree that you assemble in the interface. You can open Shake scripts in any text editor to examine their contents, and if you're a power user, you can make modifications to your composite right within the text of the script itself (this is only recommended if you're conversant with Shake's scripting language, covered in more detail in Part III of this book). Most of the time, however, you'll likely stay within Shake's graphical interface, which provides specialized controls for performing a wide variety of compositing tasks (many of which would be far too unwieldy to manipulate from the command line). Opening Two Scripts at Once Shake is designed to have only one script open at a time. Typically, each script is used to create a single compositing project, with a single frame range and a single node tree. Although Shake supports multiple independent node trees within the same script, all trees share the same duration, defined by the timeRange parameter in the Globals tab. If necessary, it is possible to open two scripts simultaneously into interface windows. In this case, what you're really doing is launching two instances of Shake at once. This is primarily useful if you need to copy information from one script to another. Important: When youopen Shake twice, the first instance of Shake is the only one that's able to write to and read from the cache. (For more information on caching in Shake, see Chapter 13, "Image Caching," on page 343.) 23