The Shake Interface

The time has come. You've just installed the Shake software; now you get to see it in action. Before you start working with the various Shake processes, you should become familiar with the Shake interface.

1.	If you don't have a three-button mouse, go and buy one now. Note You must have a three-button mouse to operate Shake properly.
2.	Turn on your computer and monitor if they're not already on. The login screen will appear momentarily.
3.	Type your name and password at the login prompt.
4.	Launch Shake by double-clicking the Shake icon located in your Applications/Shake folder. Note You may want to create an alias for the Shake icon on your desktop. After you launch Shake, you should see something that looks like this, but without the silly numbers, which refer to the Shake workspaces:

By default, Shake has four main workspaces:

1.	The Viewer workspace
2.	The Node workspace
3.	The tool tabs
4.	The Parameters workspace You can resize the four quadrants at any time by clicking and dragging the horizontal or vertical dividing lines of any two areas.
5.	Click the dividing line between the Parameters workspace and the tool tabs and drag left and right to change the layout of the Shake interface.

The Viewer Workspace

The Viewer workspace is where you create flipbooks to play back your images. This is also where your images and composites are interactively updated as you add nodes and change parameters. Here, you can look at the red, green, blue, or alpha components of an image. You can zoom in or out as well as create split screens to look at before-and-after views.

The Tool Tabs

The tool tabs allow you to choose what node you want to add to your process tree. Each node serves a particular function, such as color correcting, image filtering, or layering. The nodes are logically grouped into different tabs according to their functions.

The tool tabs include the following categories:

• Image

• Color

• Filter

• Key

• Layer

• Transform

• Warp

• Other

• Curve Editor

• Node View

• Time View

The Parameters Workspace

Adjustments made to a node's parameters take place inside the Parameters workspace. Clicking the right side of a node will place that node's particular set of controls into the Parameters workspace. You can adjust parameters by moving sliders, typing values, or entering expressions.

Global parameters are adjusted from within the Parameters workspace by clicking the Globals tab. These parameters affect the behavior of your entire effects setup, or what Shake refers to as a script, setting things like the time range and global motion blur controls. You can set many of these parameters in the command line, so you don't necessarily have to reset them each time you write out a script.

Primatte node loaded into Parameters workspace

The Node Workspace

In the Node workspace, you work with the many and varied process nodes. This is where the magic happens. Clips and processes are combined, and together they form a Shake script. The script, also known as a process tree, can be saved, loaded, and reused later.

Color Picker

The Color Picker allows you to sample colors from the Viewer and transfer the color settings to applicable parameters. It can be found on the Color Picker tab in the Node workspace.

Pixel Analyzer

The Pixel Analyzer is an analysis tool used to find and compare different color values of an image. You can examine the minimum, average, current, and maximum pixel values on a selection or across an entire image. It's found on the Pixel Analyzer tab in the Node workspace.

Time View

The Time View tab shows a timeline of all clips and processes within a script. You can drag a clip to the left and right to change its start and end points in time, or drag its in and out points to change its duration.

Curve Editor

The Curve Editor allows you to create, see, and modify keyframes as well as animation curves and audio waveforms. You can change the curve type as well as its cycling mode. You can access the Curve Editor through the tool tabs as well as in the Node workspace.

Audio Panel

The Audio Panel is used to read in AIFF or WAV files, mix them together, extract animation curves based on the audio frequency, manipulate the timing of the sound, and save the files again. Click the Audio Panel tab in the Node workspace to access it.

Other Interface Elements

• Pull-down menus A series of pull-down menus is located at the top-left portion of the screen. Many common functions such as script loading and saving can be accessed through these menus.

  

• Render light When the light is green, Shake isn't processing. When the light is red, it is. The cursor also changes to indicate processing.

  

• Load and Save Clicking the Load and Save buttons (in the upper-right corner of the interface) calls up the File Browser to either load a script or save the current script with the same name. Remember that these buttons apply only to the loading and saving of scripts, not to the loading of media into Shake. To save a script under a new name, choose File > Save As, which will then prompt you for a script name. To reload the same script, choose File > Reload. This will reload the script that you see on the Shake title bar.

  

  Note

  In the trial version of Shake, the capability to save scripts as well as to undo actions has been disabled.

  
  

• Infinite undo/redo By saving changes into temporary files, Shake maintains infinite undo/redo. Not all changes are flagged as "undoable," though. For example, window sizes are not saved. The left arrow button performs an undo; the right arrow button does a redo.

  You can also press Command-Z to undo and Command-Y to redo.

  

• Update buttons The Update button allows you to choose how Shake will update the scene. There are three Update modesAlways, Manual, and Releasewhich you choose by clicking and holding the left mouse button on the button to the right of Update.

  

  • Always Shake always updates the scene when you change a parameter, including time.

    

  • Manual Shake never updates the scene, including time, until you click Update, the button on the left.

    

  • Release Shake updates the scene when you release the mouse after changing any parameter, including time.

    

• Proxy buttons A proxy is a lower-resolution copy that you substitute for your high-resolution images so that you can work faster. The proxy buttons activate the use of proxy resolutions. When this is set to the Base position, it turns off the use of proxy images. Click and hold to choose a proxy resolution, or click to toggle between Base and the last-used proxy resolution.

  

• Title bar information The title bar of the Shake window gives you current version data, as well as the current script name and the current proxy resolution.

  

Contextual Help

Because most people will never read the Shake documentation, the Shake programmers have provided a contextual help window. As you pass the cursor over a button, the help window gives you a brief description of the button's function, as well as its hot key. The help information is located in a text window at the bottom center of the interface.

Node Help

Each Shake node has a Help button across from the node's namethe very first parameter listed on the Parameters tab. Click the Help button to open your current default browser and read an explanation of that particular node.

Online Documentation

For those rare souls who are actually interested in referring to the Shake documentation, you can access it by choosing Help > Shake User Manual. An Adobe PDF reader will open showing the Shake documentation.