About This Guide

This guide is an on-going, changing beast to tell you how to use Shake and Tremor. Because they both share the same engine, whatever you can do in Shake applies to Tremor as well. Additionally, you can run Shake in the Tremor-style interface, so we have decided for this release to have a unified documentation set.

If you have never used Shake or Tremor, we encourage you to try the Basic and Intermediate Tutorials for a basic idea of how things work. You can then carry on to the Advanced Tutorials to understand specific topics. If you are using Tremor, you should read the Tremor Reference section, and then move on to the Interface reference for a tab-by-tab understanding of the software.

To understand how things go together, try the Overview sections. These discuss the engine features of the software, and discuss general compositing concepts and how they apply in Shake and Tremor.

Because of the complete reworking of the interface from 2.3 to 2.4, and because of a lack of time, there may occasionally be screen captures from the older interface. We have tried to address the most glaring problems, concentrating less time on screen captures that are simply cosmetic differences. We suspect you will be able to work around these inconsistencies. They will gradually be corrected.

And now, on to the shameless plug:

For a general-purpose introduction to the concepts of digital compositing, we have included Ron Brinkmann's 1996 SIGGRAPH Course on Digital Compositing. You can consider it a preview of book on the same subject, entitled The Art and Science of Digital Compositing. Buy it now from Amazon.com. It's a great explanation of just about everything you might want to know about, well, the art and science of digital compositing.