11mins 14secs, 30meg Quicktime h.264 mov
Alrighty, due to overwhelming demand, here is a quick video giving you an overview of the mind-space of node-based compositing. By “overwhelming” I mean “at least one person”, but as anyone who has worked in the media/advertising industry will tell you, every person who takes the effort to write in represents a vast segment of the population. In this instance I assume it means that there are 4 trillion people reading this blog. Sure I could actually check my statistics, but never underestimate the power of denial . . .
In any event, hopefully this gives you an idea of how you think when dealing with nodes vs layers. This video isn’t meant to go into detail about the composite, it is more just to show you the general flow of things and how they relate to each other.
As always, if you have any questions, post them here and I will do my best to answer them. If I sound confused it is because I ate approximately 3 head of cattle at last weeks BBQ. I apologise to any vegetarians reading, but I have it on good authority that the cows I ate were real jerks.
Tags: Compositing, Shake, Tips & Tricks
Nice vid, Matt. Thanks for that. I am busy on a freelance gig this week, but I’m thinking about getting the Nuke Learning Edition so that I can practice my compositing using nodes.
What I did notice is that the method you used here is almost exactly the same one I would have used in After Effects, except you did it with nodes instead of layers. So the transition over to nodes may not be as bad for me as I feared.
Thanks.
It’s a valid point. It’s not that Shake, Nuke of Fusion can necessarily do things that After Effects can’t, it just does them in a different way and when dealing with large scripts it is easier to navigate your comp. Of course the different applications have different strengths (eg, Nuke is obviously focused on film and float colour space workflow while After Effects has *much* better animation capabilities), but for the most part they are doing the same thing in slightly different ways.
I guess I’ll have an extra advantage when it comes to knowing both programs. For instance, if I need to do a complex animation, I can do that in After Effects, render it out, and bring it into Nuke for comping. Nice.
Oh absolutely! Shake is a pain for doing motion graphics. It can be done, it’s just not as easy. Same with After Effects and very heavy feature film scripts. After Effects can do it, it’s just probably not the best tool for the job. Choosing the right tool for the job is important. If you have a lot of paint fixes or you need to make a detailed clean plate, for goodness sakes, bust open Photoshop, do your paint and then go back to your compositing package. If all you are doing is roto, maybe convince your studio to get Silhouettefx or Motor from Imagineer Systems.
It may cost a bit more for the licenses, but if it improves results and the amount of output, it will be saving money in the medium to long term.