The Foundry released a Nuke 10 Open Beta, if you're an existing NUKE user with current maintenance. Have a go, find some bugs and report them.
Remember this beta should not be used in production.
You will need a username and password.
Mailing List
Yesterday the nuke mailing list received a message informing us that the list would be transitioned into a new forum based format.
I have been apart of mailing lists since I started using Shake. The Shake list was a great resource. Easily searched when information was needed. Some of the smartest Shake artists participating. The same applies to Nuke. A mass of knowledge from other artists in the trenches to employees of the The Foundry[hello Deke].
The Foundrys decision to end the mailing list in favor of a forum is crazy. Add a forum to your Comunity section fine but for us members of the mailing list let us continue.
We have now moved away from your mailing list in favor of a Google group. Ok that will work but you do get that by doing that you pushed all the top Nuke artists away from the very support you wanted them to provide. The Nuke list answers all questions, not just high end compositor questions. We have moved away from RTFM. Having Foundry employees participate within the group helps us. We don't have to wait for support. Maybe we had a question that support has no business answering. The mailing list made it possible for artists to pick up the strange and artist centric support questions and freed The Foundry to make Nuke better. I didn't have to navigate anywhere, it was in my email[almost like a support email].
Pushing talented artists away from you is always a bad idea. This is true of both Vfx vendors and software companies. Artist have plenty to be angry about right now let's not make a simple mailing list one of them.
For those artists that are interested here are the new Google Groups. To all that contribute daily to the list, Thank you.
Update:
The Foundry has back peddled on closing the mailing list. Smart move guys.
MacPro
Apples core professional community has always consisted of artists. By that I mean folks that take pixels and make something amazing out of them on a daily bases. This might be photos, editing or simulations in Houdini or compositing in Nuke. Apple has always served the artist. In the nineties SGI was the king of doing this. Image compute speed and disk I/O at all costs. Matador and Cineon are some of the fastest image processors I have ever seen. The interactivity was great. These only run on IRIX boxes. The Foundry wishes its paint is as fast and interactive as Matadors was.
In 1997 SGI released the Octane. This machine was built for speed more importantly graphics speed. There was no 5.25 inch disk bay( they were all the rage). No CD-ROM drive. There were 2 full length PCI slots and 1 half length one. You didn't check Facebook on a Octane. There was a reason Sony Imageworks had stations for artists to use the internet. These machines were fast and even faster for drawing images.
In 2013 Apple released a new MacPro. This machine had SGI written all over it. Small, the GPU is fast. Fast disk I/O. The MacPro is pretty, but behind the design is a cooler core that can run faster longer. This means more power for a longer time from the CPU. Get what ever is in your head out on the screen no waiting. The Octanes GPU was a designated card from SGI. Sound familiar, it should the GPUs in the MacPro are also designated by Apple. They will also need the software developers to support OpenCL. From what I have read OpenCL is the the next step but it's happening slowly. Even Nvidia now supports OpenCL. No Optical drive is also similar. ThunderBolt is the new PCI slots and the internal drives bays.
The amazing thing about the new MacPro unlike like the Octanes is it can also email clients, make Quicktimes for clients, word processing and web browsing as well. A far step from the Octane. Sure you could check websites and send email on an Octane but nothing like how the new MacPro handles those tasks.
This isn't a machine for people who just want the fastest Mac for no other reason than being the fastest Mac. This is about solving image related problems and getting them done as fast and as precise as possible. The new MacPro isn't about text or fonts, it's not about Retina or your iPhone. It's not even about playing games. The new MacPro is about image compute speed which is really important to Apples core community.
8 Observations
Nuke 8 has been out for sometime here are some observations.
The camera tracker can now scale your scene based on real world measurements. No more objects that are -456.890 in scale. The stills solver works if you take your photos with the number 3 in mind. Nuke needs 3 points to calculate x,y,z axis, make sure the images you give it reflect that. The editGeo will prove to be a time saver. Model builder is getting better, far from perfect but like all good features making forward progress. Watch out for co-planar faces and vertices. Both the camera tracker and model builder has made progress in both how they work and how to make them work. That is very important.
Match grade is some what of a disappointment. The workflow for me and for most vendors the QuickTime you deliver to the client must match the dailies the editor and director have been staring at for months. Match grade failed pretty bad. I wouldn't go as far as writing it off but as for making dailies for editorial didn't get easier or faster. Whatever the mojo is I haven't found it.
Paint seems fine and the full frame rendering is amazing. Having your playback not break when you zoom in is a game changer. Your supers are going to love it.
The new color controls are cool but small. Option+command will bring up the old pop up window(it's hard to argue with 1993).
The new QuickTime settings in the writes and reads seem to help the age long color space problems with QuickTime movies. This is nice.
Nothing seems to be broken or acting differently. Only the new nodes and features seem to have bugs. Which brings me to the new submit your cash report dialog. We might get a better Nuke because of it. I almost never sent that info to the The Foundry. Shame on me.
I have been pushing Nuke 8 pretty far, 2d compositing, paint and 3d are in my mind very strong. A good release.
OpenCL →
Dave Girard:
The lackluster support of OpenCL is likely the biggest thing standing in the way of software transitioning from CUDA to OpenCL on OS X. Apple needs to stop just talking big about OpenCL and offer the aggressive support it needs to actually compete with CUDA. It’s a sad irony that Apple invented OpenCL only to see it better supported on competing platforms and that dealing with Apple to resolve problems is “unpleasant” because the company is so opaque. It is safe to say that the breakneck pace with which Final Cut Pro X 10.1 got its excellent dual GPU support wouldn’t have been possible if it wasn’t an Apple product with two teams in shouting distance of each other. Next time you read that some software isn’t optimized for the new Mac Pro or OpenCL on OS X, think twice before sticking the pitchfork in the developer—it might be Apple slowing it down.
I have been reading thru all the MacPro reviews and wondering where the The Foundry are with OpenCL. They where mentioned in by Apple in the WWDC keynote. But that doesn't mean they are getting help from Apple. I hear that an OpenCL version of Nuke is coming but how long and how good will it be. Having a GPU just for Nuke would be great but only if it works. In this same review a developer asks Apple to make Mac OS X versions of OpenCL comparable to the Linux and Windows versions.
The OS X version Mari is said to be pretty good, I hope it is going well with the Nuke code.
The Foundry Forums :: View topic - Foundry open house LA next Thursday →
Deke Kincaid:
If your in the LA region next Thursday we have an open house at our office on Dec 13th from 4-9pm. There will be food and drink. Come by and say hi.
If your not subscribed to the Nuke list, shame on you.
Nuke 7.0v1
When the first beta of Nuke 7 was available I was excited to have a look. I was hoping for some very basic fixes. I have never liked the tracker. The tracker in Nuke has always felt half baked. The RotoPaint node has huge problems. If it weren't for paint being universally horrible in compositing packages, the foundry would field a huge amount of support email.
The Foundry has done a lot to address these very problems.
The tracker really seems to be reworked. Even the math the tracks use to find the pixels from the last frame seems different. The one feature that is really great is how most of the controls are in the viewer now. You dont have to float the properties panel over the viewer. Shake had a tracker that did this and this makes tracking so much easier when there was a lot of tracking to do. You can have as many trackers as you want, adding them til you have your whole scene tracked. A really great feature. You can average tracks as well which is really handy if you have high frequency jitter in a plate. You can also start your track by hand, tracking the points you need. Then have Nuke track within those key frames. You then can go thru and fix the sections were there are problems. It's also very handy, and implemented very well. The Foundry has also added the ability to create transforms and cornerpins right from the tracker. No more dragging and making cornerpins. I wont miss doing that at all. The Nuke Tracker is now really good.
Rotopaint is looking better. The RotoPaint feels less buggy. I'll explain. RotoPaint has always felt broken and by using it you were headed down a path that might not have a end. Sure it was fine for painting a quick clean plate or touching up some hair in the few frames for a challenging greenscreen comp. But anymore that you where headed into a world of hurt. To many times I have or someone I know has been burned by the RotoPaint Node. I have watch an artist get up and walk because the only paint we have is Nuke. The best painters I know have always hated the paint in Nuke. It's getting better. The onionskin still doesn't have the option to invert your overlay. A must have for low contrast painting.
Framehold and Timeoffset for the 3D system. I'll say it again "Framehold and Timeoffset for the 3D system".
The modeler has been reworked. Building out scenes is quicker, easier and much more fun. The new geo nodes that allow for Extrusion and Bevel are great. I can't wait for Modo to start working its way into Nuke.
Here are some additional links for more information.
I am looking forward to diving more into Nuke 7 and using it in a real world environment.
Demo
I went to a Mari/Modo demo tonight.
It was good to get out and see the others in our world.
While waiting for the demo to start. I looked around. On my left were 3 guys talking. It seemed they haven't seen each other in a long time. One guy was talking about VIFX and Titanic. The other two guys laughed and commented on how long it has been. To my right was Jeremy an up and coming Mari artist, looking for work.
It was a good day to be a visual effects artist.