Alrighty guys. I have been spending a bit more time with Nuke, getting myself acquainted with it’s way of doing things. This isn’t going to be a review, or even a “which app should I use” post (more on that in the future), but more my first impressions.
- Firstly, it’s great to see Nuke going ahead with a strong development team, something that obviously was not happening with Shake in the last few years and will not happen (Shake not being developed for, in case you didn’t know.
- Following on from this, with it’s sale to The Foundry, the Nuke team has made a lot of effort to make the software more friendly to artists who are moving from different packages, especially Shake. I used the PLE (Personal Learning Edition) of Nuke back around 4.7 or so, and while it was obviously powerful, I felt the interface was completely utilitarian and not very obvious.
- Lots of on screen controls soon become very intuitive. The ability to have more than 2 viewers, ala Shake, is a god-send. The onscreen scale/rotate tools and proxies for objects when you translate them are excellent.
- The layout is completely customizable, letting you set up your workspace.
- Very logical way to set up proxies for hi-def and film-res elements.
- Am just getting into gizmos (essentially macros) and the use of python scripting is great.
- The use of channels instead of piping masks in everywhere is a great concept and one I am still getting my head around. Seeing as it is one of the most powerful features of Nuke, I need to spend more time with this.
- Roto tools seem a bit clunky, but frankly Shake was nothing to shout about either.
So far I have only really scratched the surface, but the more I use Nuke, the more comfortable I will be with it. It is still tempting to go back to what I know in Shake when I need to get something done quickly, but I am consciously trying to do more work in Nuke.
If you wanted to get started, The Foundry have a PLE version of Nuke for download and have a tonne of training materials, including a bunch of great introductory videos from the guys at FXPhD.
Tags: Compositing, Nuke, Shake
So, would you recommend learning Shake or Nuke for someone new to node-based compositing? I learned to composite with After Effects, and am pretty proficient with it, but since my goal is to become a feature film compositor, I know that I need to learn a node based compositing package.
I had thought about learning Nuke, since Shake is no longer in development. So what would you recommend? Shake, Nuke, or Fusion? Thanks in advance.
Hey Daniel, thanks for stopping by. I will be absolutely honest and say that the following is my opinion, but my opinion based on talking to a lot of mates at different studios: Shake is on the way out and Nuke is definitely on the way up. In Australia at least, most of the major studios are moving to Nuke, and if you check the job boards you will see that Nuke jobs have been increasing steadily over the last year or so. The other advantage to Nuke is that you can easily get your hands on a Personal Learning edition for PC/Mac/Unix and there has been a massive increase in Nuke training in the last two years.
Of course, if you have access to Shake, the principles of node based compositing are the same. In my opinion, Shake is *very* easy to pick up, possibly the easiest of all the node based compositors. If you learn either one, it won’t take very long to pick up the other . . . just slightly different workflows and shortcut keys. The main thing is that “node-based” is a different thought process to “layer-based”, so once you get used to it you should be fine.
As for Fusion, I used it a bit a few years ago, but to be honest it didn’t really ‘click’ with me. Of course, check the places where you would like to work and see what they use. I will post a bit more detail about this in a future post. Stay tuned for some video tips and tricks!
Matt
hello,
I saw it today, interesting site ,
i been searching for some wire removal videos or tutorials,
if u know ,can u provide me the path.
bye.
Thanks for the post! To be honest, with wire removal, something like the Foundry’s “Furnace” plugins are invaluable. You *can* do it with basic paint tools, but the dedicated image motion analysis plugins give much better, and stable, results.