Apple Shake 4 - Manual (Page 895)

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Optimizing and Troubleshooting
Your Scripts
This chapter provides tips and techniques for optimizing
your Shake scripts, to maximize image quality and
minimize render times. Additional information on
troubleshooting frequently encountered issues is also
provided.
Optimization
This section contains information about how to improve your scripts—maximizing
image quality and processing efficiency.
Use Only the Color Channels You Need
In Shake, you can combine images that use different channels. For example, you can
composite a two-channel image over a four-channel image. Shake is optimized to work
on a per-channel basis—a one-channel image usually calculates about three times
faster than a three-channel image.
For this reason, if you read in masks that have been generated by a different
application, it’s a good idea to turn them into one-channel images (using a
Monochrome node) to save on disk space and processing time. If, later in the node tree,
you apply an operation that changes channel information, Shake automatically adds
back the necessary channels.
For example, if you place a Monochrome or an Emboss node after an RGB image, that
image becomes a BW image at that point, speeding the processing of subsequent
nodes. If you later composite the image over an RGB image, or change its color (for
example, Mult with values of 1.01, 1, 1), it becomes an RGB image again.
Image Conversion Prior to Shake Import
Shake is “channel agnostic”—you can pipe any channel image into any other. When
you generate or save mask images, you can save the images using a format that
supports one-channel images (RLA or IFF, for example) to reduce disk space and
network activity. You can quickly strip channels out using the command line: