Nuke Studio on the Nuke List →

There is some good disscussion going on, on the Nuke list about Nuke Studio. Just throwing it out there if you need to kill some render time.

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.

Furious

Fast 6

Greenscreen Composite

This was a shot that had a lot of problems. Rain in the greenscreen plates. Lights on cars that didn't look right. This was paint, roto and all the tricks in the bag. This was a ton of work for a simple greenscreen.

This shot was shared with Scott Davids.

Happy New Year

Heres to a huge year in visual effects.No more excuses.We did some really great work this year. Doing great work is the only job security.

Here is a viewer capture using the new Nuke 8 viewer capture feature. A very nice feature. This little something I made for my wife, its rough and took 34 hours to render. 6k is a world of hurt. Have agreat year everyone.

setProjectFrameRange v1.1 →

Richard Greenwood:

Prompts the user for received and deliverable handle ranges on the selected read node to calculate project frame range

If I had a dime for everytime I did this.

8

Last week The Foundry released a new version of Nuke. In the past Nuke has always enjoyed a wonderful update cycle, with what Russell Dodgson calls RotoPaint bounces [agreed some of the bugs in the RotoPaint node so bad it's kinda embarrassing for The Foundry] the updates have always been really good. This time is no different. Nuke 8 has new tools and make overs to older ones. Everyone seems to be talking about the new match grade and the new text tool.

Match Grade used to be a tool kinda like the furnace plug ins, they sometimes work[in ideal situations only]. The new tool seems to work pretty good and will be helpful to have LUTs being made for your inputProcess. Clients are used to seeing their movie look how they have been seeing it all thru out post. Match grade is working pretty well for me. This will make QuickTimes easier to make for clients.

There are two features that might be overlooked.

The first of these I think shows how The Foundry feels about the GPU. The GPU acceleration used to only be in NukeX. Now full GPU acceleration is in Nuke. The second of these features is the Blinkscript node. Which makes it easy for TDs [or any Nuke artist with C++ programming skills] to make custom nodes that run on the GPU. You can setup complex nodes that render really fast on your supported GPU.

The full frame processing in the viewer is so good. So many times the supervisor says zoom in on that as he works over your shoulder, you zoom in only to have to wait for Nuke to redraw that part of the frame. Enable this feature and fear no more. It's simple but nice.

The camera tracker in Nuke 8 has been reworked and their is some new stuff in their that seems really cool. I have been playing around with the Stills Solver and it works really well. The interface to the node has changed so have a look here.

Help has been completely redone. It's really good. It was a little strange having Nuke drop you into your browser but the help is great. Movies and step by steps if you are using the tool for the first time.

You can grab a copy to play with for 15 days for free from The Foundry. You can also see a great presentation from the Nuke8 event in London.

I'm off to see what broke in RotoPaint.

Luminance Mix

relight.jpg

I saw this the other day and thought to myself, this is great but you can do that samething right now. Heres how.

set cut_paste_input [stack 0] version 7.0 v9 push $cut_paste_input NoOp { name FG_PLATE selected true xpos 142 ypos 33 } set N15f060c0 [stack 0] NoOp { name Blue_or_green_palte selected true xpos -27 ypos 33 } NoOp { inputs 0 name Color_Corrected_Plate selected true xpos -137 ypos -35 } Merge2 { inputs 2 operation difference name Merge1 selected true xpos -137 ypos 33 } Saturation { saturation 0 name Saturation1 selected true xpos -137 ypos 231 } push $N15f060c0 Merge2 { inputs 2 operation plus name Merge2 selected true xpos 142 ypos 231 }

Download script

Use a merge set to difference between the color corrected version and the non color corrected version. You then need to make it gray scale by desaturating the image. That will give you a dispill matte. You then plus this on top of your color corrected green screen plate. Then you can use the mix in the merge to control how much is added back in. This is also a knob in many dispill gizmos, it's called relight.

Enjoy.