speeding up playback

sherridge101 wrote:
Other than using proxies or bringing in rendered sections of the node tree what are the best ways of speeding up playback?

Shake Manual, page 323:
Shift-click either the forward or back playback button in the Time Bar area.
The pointer changes into the cached-playback cursor, and Shake begins to render and
cache all frames within the current frame range.

Oh, and I'm having trouble losing the links to files when I move a project.

Always Use Relative File Paths.
So when I create a FileIn with an imageName like this:
//MacintoshDisk/Users/les/Desktop/desktop crap/big_avfiles/test.mov
I edit it to be this:
./test.mov
in the same directory where I have saved the Shake script.

Relative paths are +relative to the location of the shake script.+
In other words, if you're starting from scratch, you need to save
the script with or near the media before you can use relative paths.
In my workflow, I usually keep Shake scripts in the same directory
as the media. By using relative filepaths, I can move the whole
directory and everything will work.

The important thing is whether +FileIn's imageName parameter+
is the full path or the relative path. Typically, I'll just edit the imageName
so that only ./ and the file name remain.

There is a shortcut. In the FileIn browser, if you
enable the browser to accept relative file paths (icon)
and
uncheck "show full path" (checkbox)
then you can type in the file name, starting with ./
and the resulting FileIn node is created with the relative filepath.
In this mode, you can also click on the file in the browser,
and add the ./ in front of the name.
So that technique can save you some time.

More details on this subject are available in the Shake manual.
Check out page 40 and page 112.