Some things that may help you understand Nuke:
1) Everything is a node. This is one of the fundamentals of node-based
compositing. There is no "import video" option or "media library" or "<insert
your favorite name for a central media location here>." Image files are read in
and written out via the Read and Write nodes, respectively.
2) Nuke makes heavy use of disk I/O, since its image caching mechanism is
disk-based. When you view a node, its output is calculated and cached to disk.
The next time you view that same node on the same frame and the state of the
node tree is the same as it was when the image was cached, the cache will be
used instead of a recalculation. Therefore, when playing back a comp, you
typically need to let it play through once to get everything rendered and
cached, after which it should play back smoothly. You can also use the bundled
copy of Framecycler or connect to another RAM-based player (DJV, RV, PDPlayer,
etc.) if you wish to use RAM-cached playback.
The takeaway from this is that you can have all the CPU power and RAM in the
world, but if you’re trying to work with 2k or HD footage off of a single 7,200
rpm spinning metal disk, don’t be surprised if you get 4 fps playback speed.
3) Video files are not good. For the most part, they suffer from huge
random-access overhead; in other words, asking for a frame at random will be
slow. Since Nuke is a frame-based application, this doesn’t work out very well.
Try to use image sequences instead.
4) Watch some tutorial videos and spend some more time with it. There’s a
reason Nuke is the industry standard, and it will start to make sense
eventually. Many of the same things that make After Effects great for motion
graphics and quick slap-comp work make it comparably terrible for serious shot
compositing.
5) When all of the documentation and tutorials can’t help you make sense of
something, ask questions.
Good luck.
-Nathan
From: kezly87
Sent: Friday, September 02, 2011 1:16 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [Nuke-users] Is there something I've just completely missed?
Good day all!
Before I start this topic (also my first), I wish to make it clear that I am
not ranting, or trolling, or moaning for the sake of it, I'm a brand-new user
to Nuke, and I just don't get it.
I'm looking to hopefully get into the FX industry one day, and have noted that
a lot of advertised jobs say "must have experience with Nuke", so I downloaded
the personal learning edition of Nuke yesterday, and have spent a whole
30minutes on it so far (I do intend to spend more), and it just seems
long-winded and tedious so far.
I've been using After Effects for my digital work for about 5 years now, and
obviously I'm going to be biased towards that as it's what I know and
understand, so I will give you an example of what I found rather frustrating
about my first experience in Nuke.
Scenario 1: Take footage, desaturate it, and play it back.
After Effects: Import footage, drag and drop 'black and white' fx on top, hit
render button.
Nuke: Import footage (I couldnt figure out how to do this. I found 'import
script', 'import image', 'Import project', but no 'import video'. So I just
ended up dragging and dropping a file in from windows explorer). > Drag on
saturation node > connect footage output to node input, connect node output to
viewer input > desaturate > attempt to play back, but video is fuzzy and plays
about 4fps with no sound.
It's not the computer (before anybody suggest my machine isn't powerful
enuogh), it's a 4.3Ghz i7 with 2gb Nvidia quadro semi-pro graphics card and
16bg of Ram.
So what am I missing here? If Nuke is an industry standard program, why (in my
opinion) is it so long winded?
Like I mentioned before, I'm very interested in developing my skills in this, I
just wanted to question it first.
Nice to meet everybody!
Kez
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
_______________________________________________
Nuke-users mailing list
[email protected], http://forums.thefoundry.co.uk/
http://support.thefoundry.co.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nuke-users
_______________________________________________
Nuke-users mailing list
[email protected], http://forums.thefoundry.co.uk/
http://support.thefoundry.co.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nuke-users
