Issues →

Todd Vaziri writing at vfxrant:

Today, the visual effects industry has many issues.

▪️uneven market due to film subsidies (free money) to studios

▪️6 major clients (soon to be 5) pits VFX houses against each other

▪️no union, no guild, no trade association

▪️fixed bids

▪️"digital makeup"

1/3 — Todd Vaziri (@tvaziri) January 2, 2018

If the makeup department does a bad job and vfx artists have to fix the problems, shouldn't the money spent to fix it come from the makeup budget, not from the vfx budget? I don't want to single out any of the union backed production departments but this goes for all of you. I have been fixing bad makeup and prosthetics for years. It was a running joke at Pactitle.

Nuke 11 Beta →

The Foundry:

We’re pleased to announce the beta of Nuke, NukeX and Nuke Studio 11.0 is now available for Nuke customers with current maintenance to test!

While I can't talk about what I have found in the Nuke 11 Beta I can point you over to the The Foundry's Beta Page so you too can try it out. Lots of cool things. I will also remind all FXPHD students that have the VPN setup can also try out the beta.

Beta Page

Running Nuke on Mac OS X(El Capitan- macOS Sierra)

Now I would like to begin with, if you are in a production environment you should not be using El Capitan or macOS Sierra on your machines. That being said there is a problem with the zooming in the viewer on El Capitan and macOS Sierra.

The Foundry:

After OS X El Capitan was released we became aware of viewer performance issues when zooming or moving overlay elements (such as roto widgets or transform jacks). The engineers worked to fix these issues ahead of the NUKE 10 release but unfortunately the fixes were non-trivial and it wasn't possibly to safely fix these bugs without causing other issues in time for the NUKE 10 release.

Work is ongoing on these fixes but due to these open issues El Capitan is not a fully certified platform for NUKE. This remains a high priority for the Nuke team and we hope to be able to fix these issues in a future maintenance release. This article will be updated when we have more news to share.

It is currently possible to turn on the work in progress bug fixes for the El Capitan issues by setting a couple of environment variables for NUKE 10. Please note, these environment variables enables are experimental so please take caution if you need to use them in production.

The changes the engineers have made so far can be enabled by setting the following environment variable before running Nuke:

If your like me and run Nuke at home thru the FXPHD VPN and are running Mac OS X El Capitan for learning and training these two links might be helpfull.

The Foundrys Forum

The Foundrys suppot portal

Update: Ben Woodhall Software Engineer The Foundry writing on the Nuke mailing list.

Hi Ned,

Sorry for the delay in dealing with this issue. I know it’s been a long time coming but there is a fix in the pipeline for El Capitan.

Apologies on two fronts. Firstly, I can’t promise a release date/version (but, not speaking for The Foundry, I expect it to be in an imminent 10.5 release). Secondly, it has taken way longer than a usual performance fixes to solve this. This was a particularly troublesome issue because it involved an interaction between OS X changes and Qt only when there are regular input events and window updates at the same time.

Thanks, Ben

Good to hear. While there are fixes and work arounds, I'd rather just have it work and be able to use the newest drivers from wacom.

In and Out →

Conrad Olson:

I really dislike the "In" and "Out" operations in Nuke and in this video I explain why and give you four reasons why you should use "Mask" and "Stencil" instead.

Nuke Track Assist

Mads:

Here is a little breakdown of a tool i created called TrackAssist. Based on the core of my StickIt toolset, this tool uses the CameraTracker node to generate relative motion to guide tracking points, in areas where the 2D tracker would fail. It has the option to triangulate or a full frame median. One of the major advantages is that you can use this tool with roto or keying, and that it can track areas that are off-frame.

For someone who does a lot of beauty work this looks very cool. Have a look at the video.

NuBridge →

Nukepedia:

a bried teaser video showing the main features of teh upcoming nuBridge - a gateway to Nukepedia from right inside of Nuke.

This seems very cool for smaller places that don't have TD's or Policies in place to prevent this type of interaction with the outsiade world(internet). I have worked at places that also have worries about copy right. I'll install it for sure, because I am really who this tool is built for.

Nice work Frank and company.

Vote For Tools →

Frank Rueter:

I have set up an experimental voting system on nukepedia to let people suggest and vote for tools/enhancements that the user community could provide, since often there are cool ideas around here that would be worth collecting.

The idea is that people that are interested in creating custom tools (and have time to do so) can be inspired to tackle stuff that others need.

Depending on how this works out, we could even consider little sprints, where a bunch of people connect for a weekend or so to tackle the top suggestions, and help each other out in thee process.

As mentioned above, this is just a little experiment for now to see if there is enough interest in the community to contribute ideas and votes.

It's like having your own TD. Go vote for your favorite. So far Deconvolve tool (removes Motion Blur or Blur) has 42 votes.

Capture →

Carolyn Giardina writing at the Hollywood Reporter

“John Seale, the Mad Max: Fury Road cinematographer (who won an Oscar for The English Patient) isn't convinced. "I don't think we need another category," he says. "I think cinematography should encompass the entire filmmaking process, from negative to post, as a single unit." On Fury Road, he says: "We did a lot of effects in camera. The end result was a lovely combination of live action to post action."

Roger Deakins, who received his 13th nomination this year for Sicario and who has served as visual consultant on such animated movies as How to Train Your Dragon, raises an interesting question: Why don't animated movies qualify for the cinematography prize? "There's some animation that isn't that far from some supposed live-action cinematography," he says. "Where do you put the line? And does it really matter? The Academy Awards is a celebration of film and film craft. We should look at it as a celebration of film and filmmaking.

Maybe we should have two categories for Visual effects. One for shows whose effects where done in the USA, and another category for effects done out of the country. Maybe we should have a category "Biggest Box Office". Here's the thing thou. I doubt the academy wants to get that granular with the categories. Was a camera used yes or no. They do not want water down the Oscar.

I love that Mr. Deakins also serves as a visual consultant on animated feature films. He learns so much from that experience about how a camera behaves in a computer. Working with a good animation sup must be so fun for him. He can place a camera anywhere but he chooses to be more careful. Just because a computer is involved doesn't mean it's easy or right.

To end this with visual effects in mind, in a year when there was Star Wars and Jurassic World. Ex Machina takes the Oscar. Nobody in visual effects saw that coming or asking for a separate category.

I will leave you with this