Precaching animations. How?

[Christina Halpin]

In Performance Dance, we always cache our animations before the dance. The Dancer is backstage, a Cache button is pushed, and the avatar very quickly runs through all of the animations in a dance. (Say around 5 seconds for a 4-minute dance.)

Since the dancer is behind a curtain and cannot be seen by the audience, does this caching help the audience at all? My informal impression is that my viewer does not run animations for people who are not on the screen. Shouldn't the dancer be running through these animations in front of the audience?

The caching works in this sense: If I am doing an animation in my dance for the first time, I sometimes notice a pause before the animation starts, say of about .2 seconds. Caching the animations in my dance prevents this problem for me. So I would like to cache.

And, bonus question, how many animations (or what duration) can be cached?

Thanks!