Introduction to Nuke for After Effects Artists | with @BenQEurope

[Music] hello my name is Zug and welcome to Yo's desk this is the first of a series of video tutorials brought to you by Ben q and its professional monitors line these technicala certified monitors are specifically tailored for the video production design and photography Market providing creative professionals 4K resolution 10bit support hard R calibration dual view with separate color spaces and many more features full reviews of both monitors are coming soon to Hugo's desk in the meantime check them out at benq.com for those of you that don't know me I was born in Portugal and I'm a visual effect supervisor and director working in London I've been working in the industry for 17 years I have worked for the BBC for Nexus for the mill where I was the head of the nuke composting department and currently I'm a director in visual effect super visor at fired out smoke working in trailers and cinematics for many AAA games I've also been for the past 8 years a lecture and keynote speaker for many events around the world including fmx and user event visual effects Festival IBC visual effect Society the Trojan Horse and splash among many others working closely with The Foundry National film television School scape Studios campus I2 and fxphd today I start a brand new series of videos specifically created to help you transition from after effects to Nuke so this video is meant for anyone that knows After Effects already but wishes to either complement their visual effects knowledge or completely move to a node based composting application like Nuke taking advantage of bq's 4k monitor I will be running after effects in Nuke side by side trying to achieve the same results in both applications in this first video we will do a small basic introduction to get you started before you watch more advanced videos on the series or even before you move to Nuke only tutorials we will be talking about the interface project settings how to import Clips playback talk about layers versus nodes merging two layers talking about blending modes and exporting the composite I will not go in depth on any of the above this first video is meant to give you a jump start so without further Ado let's get started on your left side you have after effects on your right side you have nuke let's start by looking at the actual interface in its differences you'll see that they're not as different as you might think so in one way you have in here this is our viewer and on the other side on nuke you have also a similar thing which is a viewer as well down here on after effects as we all know you have a timeline and the corresponding thing to Nuke is is not really a timeline it's more like something called the node graph which is where you will put all of your nodes and effects that you need to do on this project and then of course also you have the curve editor which will allow you to have curves for animation and then you have the dope sheet but the note graph is where most of the things happen then on this side here is what we call the properties bin now the properties bin at the moment is empty at the same way on After Effects you know that the properties show up in here so let's start by setting up our project settings that's always the most important thing on a project now the project settings in After Effects as you all know are set up by a new composite in After Effects you have the settings for the resolution which you have all these customade frame rates and of course the time code now in Nuke it's a bit different it's not really called a compositing settings it's a project settings because in in aftera you call it comp but in Nuke you call it a project or a script basically you have to go into the edit section of uh nuke and then you have to go into project settings when you press project settings in Nuke you open up this which is very similar to the one on after effect you can also have a frame range Now by default usually it's a normal frame range because we haven't opened any footage yet uh then we have of course frames per second default is 24 because nuke is mostly for film composting and then we have also just like in After Effects we have multiple presets of resolution in this case if we want 4K or if we want HD uh so as you can see these are the two places now let's move on to bringing in some footage now to bring in footage in After Effects as we all know you basically just have to go in here and say import file now I am opening up a sequence from a project that I did last year for fire do smoke called The Crew which was a CG trailer I'm going to open up the final render so we can have a look at how it looked at the very end so I'm going to open up version 20 here I'm going to do the same thing in Nuke so you can see at the same time so in Nuke it doesn't really work within importing it's not called importing in Nuke there is a couple of ways of doing it you can of course uh drag a clip into the to the note graph just like you can do in After Effects as well uh the difference is that in here you have to go into the this menu here so these are the multiple effects you can have in Nuke you see you can have the read nodes you can have every single node is categorized by different settings so I'm going to go into the r and you can see that it is called the read note I'm going to click read now in Nuke it is a bit different as you can see automatically it made it as a sequence so in Nuke it always represents itself as a sequence you can see the hashtags which is the number of uh frames that we have and then you can see the sequences like that if you look in here down here you have a button called sequences if you press that button you can now see it as frames just like after effects does and you can even press this little little very small button on this side and if you open it up you can see that you have even a a preview per frames so then you can actually only import one frame if you want to soon as I press open just like on After Effects you saw the settings down on the left on your right you can see the settings of nuke so this is what we called a read node and it's a a node that gives you the path of where it is it gives you the resolution of the original file uh then you have things like if you want to set a proxy you can also set the frame range and you can select what color space you're bringing in the footage with as well now when one of the things that is different is that on after effects if I double click on the clip you can immediately see that I can play it back now in Nuke it doesn't really work the same way if I click on the read note it doesn't really do anything because by default nuke always has something called the viewer and the viewer is a node as well just like everything in Nuke it's always everything is just nodes that you have to attach to one another so if I now attach this input of the node into the read node now if I pray back I can see that now it's playing back the clip so now we have after effects and nuke running at the same time side by side now one thing you should know is that nuke by default is always 3 to bit float that means that we have always a linear color space in After Effects that's not the case in After Effects It's Always 8bit by default which you can see down here on this icon here so if you press this button you can clearly see that my project settings are now with depth of 8bit per channel so if I select here if I wanted to match exactly what I'm doing in Nuke I would have to change it to 32bit float per Channel now in terms of the viewer controls the two applications are very similar indeed as you can see this is my viewer of my project and as I drag by frames I can see that I can go backwards and forwards now in Nuke things are slightly different now you do have the play button and the stop button and also of course you have the frame by frame and you can go to to last frame or to the beginning frame now one thing is that in Nuke you always have default by frames H you can change this uh by going into here and change it to time code instead so in After Effects it's exactly the opposite it defaults to uh time code but now that we had a little small idea of where things are and how to actually import the clip now normally on a visual effects company you get all these passes you get the dep passes diffuse filters you know diffuse lighting emissions glob eliminations you can even check some of my tutorials on Yo's desk to find out more how to use these uh passes in compositing uh but in reality this is why nuke is so used for CG compositing because it's so much more flexible for these kind of things I'm going to actually show you how flexible this is so for example if I pick up this folder which has a multiple two of different types of renders if I drag it entirely into nuke I basically get a a bunch of sequences now of course if you want to view them you don't really have to press the viewer and individually move them like this you could literally just select the image you want to see and press one and then you can see it so that's for example the main pass that has an alpha Channel and that's the main render from Red shift now let's let me show you in After Effects and after effect is a bit more tricky now I cannot just drag the folder because if I drag the folder it will only bring in one of the sequences I'm going to on the other hand instead of doing that I'm going to press import and I'm going to select all my sequences then I'm going to not forget to go to the options and select multiple sequences if I do that then it will import not every single frame but every sequence if I press open it now brought the same sequences so if I press the main sequence and I play it back you can see that I can play it back just like Nuke plays now one thing that we're missing is is we're missing a background so I'm going to bring in a background for nuke and to bring all my backgrounds and as you can see same deal here I have also my background now if I want to merge these two images together you know just like in Photoshop after effects or anything that you have a lower layer in a in a top layer I'm going to do it like this so in After Effects let's start with After Effects first to make a comp as you know we can drag it into our composite and this is my comp so in After Effects it's really easy that you can have a layer on the top and a layer on the bottom now let's do the same thing in nuke in Nuke it is a little different like in Nuke basically you have your background and then you have your foreground now the way that it works is we're going to use what we call a merge node in Nuke now we going to go into the merge menu now the way that it works is if I press the M button you can see that I have what I called a merge node now a merge node allows you to have an A and A B which is A over B so and that's what the name it is so B is always for background whatever you want on the background that should be your B and whatever is on the foreground is the A and then of course on the side you also have a mask input as well so the way that this works is that you basically would go ahead and put your background into your actual background and then your foreground into your foreground then if you want to view this you can either switch the viewer to it or you can like I said select that node press one and then you're viewing the result of your composite now in here if I now play back I have exactly the same composite that I just did on After Effects nothing special here but this is where After Effects and nuke really really are different now on one hand on After Effects I can apply a specific special effect like for example brightness and contrast which is the most common node that everyone uses going to go to brightness and contrast bring in the car a bit more I'm going to push the the brightness down to the car and I'm going to contrast the car a little bit more now this of course as you all know we have that as an effect so now this is where things really become different in Nuke you would have done a very different way you basically can clearly see that if I press the one button first of all because you're using a node-based compositing application it's much faster to switch so I I can switch to just viewing this thing can switch just viewing that thing or I can switch just viewing the final comp also I can I'll automatic ly put a color correction note here so let's say here that I go in here and I say we're going to put a grade note on this side and then we're going to put another gr note on the other side as well now on this one here I have a couple of options now the way it works is that you have to double click on it to see it now if I double click on both and I double click on every single thing you can see that I start Gathering a bunch of controllers now these controllers of course can be switched off by pressing this button here and you can can limit how many controllers you can see by typing a different number over there the way that it works you can I'm not going to really go into detail of what blackpoint white Point lift gain multiply and Gamma is you can check that on another tutorial from Yugo desk later on but you if we do a bit of contrast which would be SL slightly multiplication up and then this is for the background of course I'm going to lower the background a little bit and contrast it a bit and then for the car I'm going to push the car out a little bit as well now you see now this is the way that it works so in After Effects the same way when I'm actually looking at an effect like this I can switch one of them off the other one off but here's the real advantage of having note compositing note compositing allows you to try a bunch of things not only you can try a bunch of things but you can actually repeat and you can actually copy and you can actually have multiple versions let's say for a moment here that I want I have a client coming in and they don't like this version so so I've done this version I thought it was cool but they didn't thought it was cool so I'm going to now select this entire thing I'm going to paste it on this side and you see that now I have another comp now on this comp here let's say that I'm am going to actually make my background much brighter and my contrast much lower and then the car will be almost a silhouette let's imagine that now of course this is just for teaching purposes as you saw that was not what we did on the car we did a lot more more this shot of course took several days so now as you can see I have my first version which was the car brighter in the background uh lighter and I can actually play it back and also not only I have that version but I also have this version here which is exactly the opposite not only I can show my client on the Fly the two versions I can even press the one button for this merge node and the two button for this one and actually flip from one and the other immediately so I can show the client what I'm doing I I can even do a wipe between them so that I can actually show the client exactly the differences that I have between so as you can see node bake compositing not only allows you to have multiple examples and allows you to work a bit faster but it also is very open for experimentation that's why I like it so much and that's why I switched from after effects to fusion and to shake and now to Nuke now let's say that the the actual client is still not happy now if they're not happy I could literally just go in here and select and do yet another version and I can now say okay let's we're not even going to do grade notes we actually going to put a color corrector node in the background and now I'm going to say imagine the client says that they want to have a whole thing a bit more blue so I'm going to tint the thing to blue and then on the car tint the car a bit more blue as well but not as much as the background and just tint a car a little blue and now we have that version here so as you can see now we have version one which was well we have the normal version which was the render that we've done we then have if I press number two on this merge node I have the version that we first did then if I press number three I have then the new contrast version I've pressed number four I have the Blue version as you can see my my the viewer has 1 two three inputs and the reason I do that is because now I can easily tell my client to see version one version two version three or version four and as a click of a button I can just show them multiple versions of the same thing now not to say that I can't do this in After Effects of course I can but it would have it would have meant that I would have had to do multiple nested comps I would have to actually make multiple pre-ms and test things out that way so let's go back to After Effects uh now I'm going to just bring in some players so we can just put them in uh on top of the image so I can show you blending modes in Nuke now I just brought into After Effects uh two different things that we've made let's do the SC in After Effects so I'm going to start by putting in my police lights I of course the police lights will need to be merged with a different blending mode so I'm going to put them as an additive blending mode I'm then going to put my uh lights I'm going to put my background lights as well which I will put on top below the police lights uh I also of course have to put it as an additive call correction then I have my actual Lights of the headlamps which I'm going to put um just on top of everything and again I have to do additive uh as well for it to actually work now as you can see there's something going on here which is a bit weird we'll go back to it in a minute now inside of nuke I'll do exactly the same thing first of all I'm going to start by bringing in the footage um that we need now that the way that it works I'm just going to put nuke uh in full screen so I can show show you uh the way that it works is that you usually merge uh more layers so if you want to merge the same way we're going to put first police lights and then we're going to merge the background then we're going to LGE the lights you basically just use three uh nodes so I'm going to merge the lights and then I'm going to merge the other lights and then I'm going to merge the other lights the way that it works is that you start to make what they called a node graph and it's a a script you know you start on on the top and you go on the B Bottom now these need to be changed the of course as an additive uh so I'm going to change the merge node the blending mode of the merge node so you see here my blending mode can be anything from what After Effects has or photoshop has in this case I'm going to put a Plus on my blending mode and then I'm going to do the same thing to all the other blending modes as well and this should Now give me this image here now this image here looks fine to me so one of the cool things with having a note graph is that now because I have this I can see that that's my background can even play it that's my foreground and then if I use the merge node you can see by pressing one I can see the full comp then I can go ahead and check this one which is the lights on the car uh which were done uh using optical flares on a 3D system in Nuke later on I will do a video tutorial on Yo's desk about this um and then you have the highlights and lights on the side especially on the set and then you have of course the headlamps and of course it doesn't really look like the final comp because the final comp of course has it has dep of field it has a bunch of really complex visual effects that we've done to the shot uh but as you can see this is you know close enough it's a starting point now if I go into After Effects you commence to see some of the issues now After Effects by default doesn't really like very high Dynamic images when I say idynamic R Images look just look at this lamp here I'm just going to zoom in to here as well and show you what I mean so these lamps look similar but for some reason on After Effects it looks like it's slightly over exposed now in After Effects um if I use my f-stop I can lower it and you can see that it's all here we can kind of see that all dyamic range is still here now in Nuke if I lower my uh f-stop which is the top one in in Nuke you don't have just f-stop you have the f- stop which is this slider here then you have the gamma which is this slider here as well so they're very very uh powerful for color correction the gamma is great for you to see saturation of an image and of course the f-stop allows you to see dynamic range and uh luminance of an image so which is really powerful so you see if I lower they look exactly the same and so we have a match now if I press the f- stop to go back and if I press this F stop to go back you see that there's something different this image looks much brighter than that image now the reason this is happening is because the calculation of linear color space in Nuke the mathematical calculation is slightly different from After Effects now there's ways of course of fixing this you could have went to your project settings and in color settings you could have told them to blend all the colors using gamma of one if I do that the blending will be matching the same blending that I have in Nuke and so now even if I lower I can still see the same image if you don't do this you cannot see the dynamic range the same thing as well if you now change your comp to 8bit you can clearly see the dynamic range was completely lost so nuke doesn't really have the same thing I can't really show you an 8bit comp but in in After Effects if I switch from 8bit to 16 or to 32 so if I switch to 8 bit you have a full clamped image if I switch to 42 I have all the dynamic range like in Nuke I'm going to switch back to 32bit float I'm also going to save it's always good to save and there you have it as you can see we have successfully comped the same thing exactly the same thing on both After Effects and nuke you can clearly see though by playing it back now nuke immediately uh showed me the comp and after effects is still struggling to playing it back one of the reasons this is happening is because after effects is really not optimized to float 32-bit float and nuke is completely optimized to 32-bit because it never switches from 8bit to 16 to 42 it always works in 32 so that's one of the advantages and that's why nuke is also used in production so much more in visual effects for hardcore visual effects if you're just using uh Motion Graphics then you should stick with After Effects but if you want to do hardcore visual effects nuke is a much better option now one last thing of course let's just render our fantastic comps so of course in af effects there's no mystery it's quite easy as you all know we just basically go into our comp add to render Cube so I'm going to do a quick time I want to use prores HQ and then I'm going to press okay so that's a quick time I'm going to save and then I'm going to press render that's done now I go to my desktop I should have a quick time of the comp that I've just made so that's the quick time that we've just created now in Nuke slightly different approach you would have to just like anything in Nuke is is a node so the same way that you saw a node called the read node right below it you have one called the right node which is a w you can see that you have a node called the right node so at any moment I can I can just save just this if I want to or I can render the whole comp so I'm going to put it on the bottom of my comp I'm now going to double click say that I want to save it on my desktop I'm going to call this uh nuke to press save automatically because I told him that it's a do move it's going to pick up press 444 that's the default I'm going to change it to 42 uh 2 now if I want I now can press the render button press on and now it's going to start rendering and that's done and so now if I go to my desktop I have the nuke render and I have the after effects render from the top and the bottom they look exactly the same they're exactly the same render now of course this video was a bit too long I know I'm afraid but there's a lot more to tackle and to show you this for me is just a little introduction of how you should start tackling a project in Nuke and it's basically I wanted to make this side by side view because I think it is one of the best ways for you to kind of understand how nuke works and how AF effects works and I know we haven't went through everything of course not nuke takes months to to understand uh where the buttons are and it takes years to master I've been using nuke for 10 years but on later tutorials I'm sure that we are going to tackle different parts of this and I'm sure you're going to have a much better understanding of how this works and that was it for today sorry for the long tutorial but there was a lot to talk about I hope you've enjoyed this first video a followup will come shortly in the next few weeks if you want check out some of my videos at Hugo's desk where every month we will have new videos about visual effects nuke gaming and technology and thank you so much for [Music] watching

Channel: Hugo's Desk ™

Views: 56,365

Keywords: Tutorial, BenQ, Monitor, After Effects, AE, Nuke, The Foundry Nuke, Adobe, Adobe After Effects, Training, Learning, Visual Effects, Hugo Guerra, Hugo's Desk, Layers, Nodes, UHD, 4K, Gaming, VFX, Shake, Smoke, Apple, Fusion, Andrew Kramer

Id: bKeZfxXDGNc

Length: 25min 45sec (1545 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 21 2017