Apple Shake 4 - Manual (Page 137)

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Using Proxies
Shake has a sophisticated proxy system that lets you
dynamically adjust the resolution of the images to speed
your workflow. This chapter covers how to tailor Shake’s
proxy system to suit your needs.
Using Proxies
This section discusses how to use proxies to speed up your workflow. This includes
using Shake’s interactive scale setting, creating and assigning proxies to footage in your
script, creating custom proxy settings, working with offline full-resolution elements,
and pre-generating proxies.
What Are Proxies?
A proxy is a lower-resolution image that can be temporarily substituted for the high-
resolution plates in your script, thereby enabling you to work and see rendered tests
faster. Because the images are smaller, you drastically decrease the processing time,
memory requirements, and amount of time spent reading and writing files as you
work. Naturally, the trade-off is that the quality of the image displayed in the Viewer
suffers, which is why proxies are generally used only when creating low-resolution
comps, and creating test previews. After assembling a script using proxies, you can
return your script to the original, full resolution in order to render the final output.
You can also use proxies to temporarily view anamorphic images in flattened space. For
more information, see “
About Aspect Ratios and Nonsquare Pixels ” on page 209.
Proxies and Final Low-Resolution Output Renders
When you work with film plates and you need to generate a high-quality video
output, you have better (but slower) results if you render your plates at full resolution
and then size them down, instead of using the proxies to generate low-resolution
images. The proxies can be used to generate lower-resolution output files, but the
quality is not as high as with full-resolution rendering.