Apple Shake 4 - Manual (Page 23)

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An Overview of the Shake User
Interface
This chapter provides a fast introduction to all aspects of
the Shake graphical user interface. It also provides in-
depth 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.)