Nuke Compositing 4 Beginners #1 | Interface, node vs layers, settings | @FoundryTeam @BenQEurope

hello everyone this is hugo and welcome to ego's desk a really short video just to introduce what i what this video is about so first of all thank you so much for coming to my anniversary stream it was great to celebrate the six years of hugo's desk a couple days ago now one of the problems of the stream was obviously because i was celebrating there was a lot of moments where i was talking with the chat and i was integrating with the chat and i was basically like answering q and a's and also we had the giveaways as well and obviously it's a bit hard to follow the tutorials that's why i decided to do this version this is an edited version i removed all the q as i removed all the giveaways i removed to the cake i removed everything and it's just the new compositing if you want to follow along goes without saying if you still want to watch the full stream you can go to this link and you can watch the whole thing it has a lot of q and a's and a lot of really nice questions and it's a really nice stream and i can't thank you enough for all the support of course now this video is all about like basically trying to teach you nuke from scratch it's called nuke for dummies and it's part one part two and uh potentially even a part three will come soon since i'm gonna record next week again and part two of the anniversary stream since we never finished it goes without saying of course that this is just scratching the surface nuke is a really complicated software and composting in general is quite complicated it takes a long time to master so this is just give you a taster just to show you a bit what the application can do and also to give you a bit of an introduction to the interface in how things operate keep in mind that this was recorded live so obviously there are certain things that could have been better and certain things could have been explained better but i was doing my best to do it live if you want a more bespoke training like a pre-recorded training i also have my nuke course which is available right now and you can watch this video if you want to know more about it and if you are interested to sign up just contact me on social media or contact me on twitter at yougo seegera i would like to finish off by thanking thank you for supporting this stream and making it possible for actually to happen again goes without saying that i would like to thank my patreons my twitch subscribers and my members on youtube for all the amazing support they give me every month your names are on the credits at the end of the video of course without further ado i hope you enjoyed nuke for dummies part one i'll see you next time so uh i'm going to go ahead and open nuke and just get this show started so let's uh begin this um um tutorial as i explained before keep in mind that this is just an introduction and i'm gonna plow through this okay so it's it's really going to be just an introduction we're probably not going to be able to cover a lot and you know i am going to be a lot of doing a lot of jumps um between things and because i feel like there's some stuff that is important for you to know right now some stuff is not as important you know as you know nuke is probably the industry standard for compositing it's the most used um compositor in the world let's start with just the practicals of the interface and but i just want to give you kind of a bit of a rundown of the most important things to keep in mind that nuke is really different from other applications now obviously the version that you're watching now is the version that i have adapted and changed so the the interface is a bit different from the interface that you normally see so i'm going to start with that i'm going to start by putting like the compositing interface which is this one this is the typical compositing interface that you would get if you first load up nuke for the first time you know normally you have um you know you have like a viewer on the top here and then you have a note graph on the bottom and then you have properties bins on your your side now one of the things that i wanted to really kind of like talk about here is that nuke is much more simple than people think but it takes a long time to master i think that's the main thing that you need to kind of keep in mind and that it is like you know it is like like a bit of a pain to understanding master but once you master it it's much more powerful than after effects much much more powerful than than fusion because it has so many capabilities and i'm going to do a really quick rundown of the actual os of the actual um interface so as i said we have the viewer here now the viewer is where everything is viewed at the moment if you want to watch some footage the note graph is where we have what we call a node graph which usually is where we have nodes and this is one of the the biggest sticking points for people is the node graph thing the tree as people say it and by the way you press spacebar to go from full screen to not full screen on any of these places inside of nuke you can go full screen on properties by hitting the space bar you can go full screen on the viewer by hitting the spacebar you can go full screen on note graph by hitting the space bar now i've already brought in some footage but we're going to start by bringing in some footage now there are two ways of bringing in footage into nuke you can drag and drop from the viewer or the explorer or you can oh and that one is easy you just drag and drop but i'm going to do the more normal version which is to actually load footage and now for you to load footage you have all these icons on the side here and this is where you find all your filters plugins and gizmos to bring in some footage remember that these tabs all these icons are separated by classes and so you see if i leave the mouse it says image if i leave the mouse on this one it says draw you know it always gives you the information of what each of these classes are so if you leave the mouse here you see channel lumas here filter it's a bit stupid that the key the actual key is on top of the name so you have transform everything in nuke is like that you know if i leave the mouse here it tells me what that is if you leave the mouse here that is if i leave the mouse here it tells me what that is as well so this is one of the coolest things about nuke actually every single thing is possible for you to view what it does by just leaving the mouse over it and this is really remarkable because sometimes you don't know what something is so you just leave the mouse and then it tells you it's magical anyway i'm gonna go and go into image and then we have two things here we have something called the read and the right so the read is the r button for read and the read and the right to read in some images i'm gonna press the read button as soon as i press the read button it opens up a browser now this is a browser which might confuse some people because it's very different from other applications because you basically click once to go to things so and also it gives you the actual path the actual computer path because obviously nuke is driven by it was created first in unix in linux so it's obviously it's going to be like a scripting kind of um thing i'm going to now bring in some footage now let's start by bringing any footage whatsoever like i have a bunch of projects these by the way these are all kind of the projects that i'm kind of using for my course so a lot of them will be like production stuff because i am using production assets for the nuke course that i'm selling on kickstart on patreon so most of these things are going to be like production sometimes from the mill sometimes from five dot smoke it really like it really kind of depends on what the production is so i'm going to open up something uh from the mill for example so this is some footage from the bb from bbc god only knows and i'm just gonna bring whatever plate and i'm going to just bring this one here and so as you saw what happened there is that when you go into a folder inside of nuke you see what happens you basically just go to the path you know you go to the path and then for example you go to a shot and then in here you see that right now what you see is this which is a bit weird i know because it has the name of the file which of course it's the naming convention we had at the mill but this actually has hashtag hashtag these are the numbers of the frames and then it says that this sequence is actually from frame 1001 2058 and then it says how much now this is because nuke groups the footage so if you go to the finder you'll see all the frames but in here you will see them like grouped and that's because of this little button here called sequences so if i untick this button then you can see the individual frames but we always work with sequences and that's why this kind of um kind of works like that let's go back to this i'm going to bring in this piece of footage now and then you just press open now if you want to open several of them you could press the next button here and then go back into another file and then press open and then it will open too now so this is happens you get these kind of weird squares these are what we called read nodes and they have a thumbnail and these actually give you a lot of information they give you information of what they do you know like basically it has the name and it has the information of the file itself so this file for example only has a red the green and blue channel there's no alpha channel on these ones obviously if you open up something with an alpha channel it would have have a little i didn't open anything with an alpha channel but it would have had like a little white box there and these are the nodes and for you to watch them on the viewer because as you can see the viewer is black at the moment you just need to press on any of them and you know just select one of them and usually there's always a viewer here so there's two ways you can either connect to the viewer or you can just press one and then it connects to the viewer you can press one to that one or press one to that one and then automatically connect so if you press one it automatically goes into the screen and gives you a lot of information gives you the resolution so if i press this here and i press f to center by the way so this is like 2048 by 1546 this was shot with an alexa camera full frame uh and by like five years ago so obviously that's why it's not 4k so this is like a plate that we had this is like a raw plate that we got from the alexa and on the viewer of course you can kind of see that for some reason like magically the viewer is actually already with a frame range and this is why where the confusion lies in nuke you know the frame range of nuke is always how always has to do with the first file that you brought into nuke okay so the first file you brought into nuke that is going to set the the timeline the frame range of what you're trying to composite once as i was saying this view here you can kind of see that it's set now to 1001 to 1058 and if i press and if i press double plus on the file you can kind of see that there's like some settings on the side here these are the settings of each of these read nodes so for example if i press on this one i see it if i press on that one i see that one so this is everything i've opened so far these are the settings of all these nodes and this is what we call a read node it gives you a lot of information it has a resolution it has the frame range it has all these things and as you can see that file which was the first one that i brought in has 1001 starts at 1001 and then it finishes at 10 58. once this is very basic if you want you can press play and then you can watch the video now in nuke not like after effects if you press play it doesn't play back in real time right away it takes once to play it in real time so it first has to cache it into ram and then it starts playing back so as you can see now it's looping it always loops by default and it loops by default because that's how we usually do compositing we always loop the shot and watch it and watch it and watch it like some crazy people so if you want one thing you must notice one thing you must know is that once it's ram and it's playing back in real time like it is now you need to be careful because as soon as i change anything on the viewer it starts playing again so it starts caching again on ram so if i for example open up you see now that it's bigger it has to cache again so that's one of the tricky things if you start previewing and if i zoom in it's already cached but if i zoom out it's already cached and if i go in here you see it kind of is cached because now it's cached it in a really high resolution so it's already cached in that way but if you want to avoid this to always cache when you zoom in and you zoom out or you do any changes there is a little button on the top here this button which if i leave the mouse over it see if i it's i think it's cropped just a second um i've i pressed the wrong button so i want to zoom in here so if i leave the mouse here this is what we called this the the the full frame processing so this means if i press this list this little button and i have this little red icon here now it doesn't matter um what i do regardless if i zoom in if i zoom out you know for example if i decide to cache this file here you see it's going to cache it once at this resolution so you see because it's much smaller than full hd and it once it caches it starts playing in real time but notice that now i zoom in and it doesn't cache again so be aware that that is the full what we call the full frame processing that means that it will always process the whole frame instead of just a section and that is a really important thing because inside of nuke we're always like zooming in and watching a lot of things in detail you know this is the final comp by the way the shot that we did so we always zoom in quite a lot like we always like basically do what we what we in the industry call pixel you know that's the whole idea of this so um we always want to zoom in anyway let's let's keep going the workspace that i'm running right now someone is asking i'm running the composting workspace that's the main composting that's the like the one that that boots up with nuke um i'm gonna change the the workspace in a minute and so that's the idea but this is the compositing workspace there's a lot of different compositing workspaces so as i was saying you can play it back and remember that little button for the full processing now when i'm viewing something you can kind of see that my viewer is attached to viewer this footage right so i let's let's say for example that we bring in more footage here so let's say that we have this is the cool thing about nuke like remember when i press this piece of footage and press one i watch this clip right so now i'm watching this clip which is for all going through the chairs if i press this clip press one then i watch that one if i press this one now i watch that one now remember notice how this one is not playing the reason this one is not playing is because if i double click on it you can kind of see that this one starts at 1071 not at 1001 and this is because my timeline is set to 1001 to 1058. now if i have a lot of footage inside of nuke if i temporarily want to bypass the timeline settings of 1001 to 1058 i can go in here and where it says global i can go into you see there's like a lot of options here we have global which is setting for the settings of the project we have input we have in and out and we have visible i'm going to put input if i put input now as i change my inputs the frame range changes as well notice on on this one is 1001 to 1058 and then if i press on this one it changes the frame range to 1071 to one thousand one thousand five hundred seven now remember this shot here which is the home front trailer i directed it's gonna take longer to process because this one is only hd and this one is actually two and a half k so we're talking about like quite a lot more resolution and to to actually go through this is the final comp which i will leave caching and obviously the faster your ram is and the faster your disk is and the faster your cpu is the faster the previewing happens but so as you can see now this is full playing back and once it's cached i can then play it back forever now remember this caching goes through to your hard drive so it goes through the memory and it goes to your hard drive there's a specific place in nuke that you can set up for the caching and so once you open this shot again on another script you know imagine that you continue this shot tomorrow or imagine that you go through this shot tomorrow or maybe in a few days it will be already cached on your machine as a cache so it is pretty cool in that sense because you can cache stuff to make it faster we'll go through that as well in a second but yeah so keeping that in mind now the cool thing about nuke is the way that you can actually preview things uh in the same like so that you can compare things i think that's why note compositing is so popular because you can compare things so for example in here you can kind of see um that we have the viewer you know this little line we can set it up to that one then we can watch this now watch how the viewer has multiple inputs it actually has nine inputs so i can press this one and then i can go and have another one so now i have three inputs on my viewer the cool thing about this is that now that i have one two three if i click on the viewer i can then press one two three and i can actually watch three things at the same time which is really advantageous if you're like working with a client and you're just showing them something so imagine if you're with a client and you're showing them okay guys this is what we had and this is what we did you know so that then we can kind of like split in screen and go between them and and actually in fact we can even like do a split screen and a wipe between them obviously the wipe is not going to work because obviously this one is hd and this is two and a half k so it's not going to match the wipe but that's normal that it doesn't match because it's different resolutions and it's different things but but that that's also for you to keep in mind that that's kind of how it works nuke you can kind of play back things in the background although do keep in mind that i have a quite powerful machine so so you do need a quite powerful machine if you're gonna really go for it um i highly recommend you using dual graphic cards because and nuke does support two graphic cards um although you need to be careful with this like because you see it says here enable multi gpu support it actually is going to use both of them but it only uses both if they're both the same okay so they cannot be different graphic cards they have to be exactly the same manufacturer exactly the same vram exactly the same settings everything has to be the same thing okay anyway i'm getting ahead of myself here okay so sashin patra vfx asks what is color management inside of nuke so color management is something that allows you to read in footage into nuke on a specific color space and without with another color space i'll show you really quickly what i mean with what i just said so if you look closely this piece of footage which is a dpx which is a type of file format not used very much anymore this type of type of color color usually has the capability of storing more information than just the regular values of an image so this actually is a high dynamic range image so for example look at this part of the staircase here it looks overexposed right but it actually is not overexposed if i drop the exposure slider on the viewer which we haven't talked about in a second but if i exp if i bring this slider down you can kind of see there's still a lot of information there that looked like it was overexposed the same goes for this light here this lamp also looks like it's overexposed but it's actually not there's like a lot of information here and this is because these uh cameras have a lot of dynamic range now having said that each camera has its own color space and that's what color management deals with so for example this one was filmed with the alexa color space and it was converted to dpx cine and color spice which is this one here so these are all the color spaces that we usually have inside of nuke and as you can see we have like the typical color space which is sinion which is the dpx type of color space then we have linear srgb reaction nine and these are basically some of them are the color spaces of the input of the file like so maybe it would be the color space of the red camber or maybe it would be the color space of the alexa camera because every camera has an i-dynamic range sensor right so there's a lot of things that it captures obviously i'm really oversimplifying this okay but it captures a lot of a lot of data like we're talking about like thousands of values of luminance but for you to watch it on your monitor it has to be brought down to a level that it doesn't blind you okay so the image has to be lowered it has to basically be converted with what we call the lut so that it's actually possible for you to view it and these are what these luts are we have the alexa lut we have the the p loglet the red lot the srgb the rexon9 all these are the different luts in different color spaces that exist for each camera in each file format now color management what it does it it manages all these color spaces and converts it to one single color space so that you can view your image inside of nuke because if you didn't do that everything would not match you know so in nuke everything is linear and you can kind of see that here when you look at the color curves here for example so everything in in nuke is linear which means if you look at this curve you can kind of see that what is zero is zero and what is one is one but if you go to the curves of srgb rexon 09 cinean they all have different curves that's how they bend light and darkness to be viewed on a specific monitor so that's what color management does color management is a methodology to basically so help you to manage an incoming file to be converted to linear and then when it goes out of nuke it gets converted to the color that you want for delivery an example of this would be you bring in something from an alexa camera the color management system converts it to linear inside of nuke you work in linear and then when you output from nuke when you render you need to convert it for example to rec709 for tv or you converted to srgb for for web or you can convert it to linear to give it to another application or you can convert it to a rec 2020 for hdr broadcast so there's a lot of those things going on and that's what color management does it manages all these color spaces obviously the most modern color color management tool right now is aces which is a method that the academy the oscars academy is trying to give a standardization of color management i hope i've explained you a little bit what color management is this is the the shortest version that i can find really and i hope it works um really quickly just go through the viewer really quickly so i have one image here remember that we can have up to three connected to the viewer and at the moment i have this one here if i press space bar to make it full screen then i press the f button to make it full screen here a couple of things to think about that are more important on the viewer itself on the top here we have the non-destructive f-stop so this is basically the f-stop that you can basically go up on the f-stop and you can go down on the f-stop this is incredibly important it's incredibly important because this is the way you're gonna check for grain this is the way you're gonna check for edges this is the way you're gonna check if there is like still information on something so for example like i showed you on the staircase here we can kind of still see the information there that's really an important slider which is the f-stop it's what we call the exposure slider okay so we have obviously the gain which goes down or it goes up and this is non-destructive as soon as you touch it it becomes red that's because it tells you that it's been changed so you can press the red button again and it goes back to default default on the settings of nuke is f8 that's the default for exposure you can also do the numbers here which are uh equal to the multiplication of the image so if i go with two that's a multiplication by two three multiplication four multiplication five multiplication six multiplication i can multiply the image just like a multiply on this side though i have the y which is the gamma now the gamma does not deal with exposure it doesn't deal with brights or darks it deals with the mid-tones and so when i slide it notice how nothing gets overexposed as opposed to the exposure which i when i expose it becomes overexposed it becomes brighter when i go to gamma nothing gets overexposed what you do is the mid-tones or the skin tones become brighter but not the brights and not the darks the same goes if i go downwards nothing gets the overexposure is still there you see it's fully overexposed now the gamma is incredibly good for you to see skin tones so for example here i noticed that there's like a yellowish tint to the staircase so which is really good information and here you can kind of see that we have two different greens although in here you can also see that the blue is much lower in terms of luminosity as well so this is a great way for you to see the color density of things so for example in here if i go all the way down you can kind of see this shirt did look like it was white right but it's actually not white if i go really down on the gamma you can actually see that the shirt is actually yellowish this is going to be very important when you're matching things and when you're merging cg with the footage and doing all those kind of things and so again as soon as you touch anything it becomes red and then you can press on it and do it now like i said i'm only going to talk about the most important things i think these are the most important things by far inside the viewer the exposure and also like the the gamma slider for the color in the mid-tones of nuke down here of course we have the timeline we can scrub through the timeline of course obviously this is really simple i can go frame by frame by using the arrow keys as well and you know i can of course go back i can go to the last frame i can go to the first frame i can go each keyframe i can go frame by frame as well i can press play i can play backwards as well and then of course i have repeat bounce stop continue so bounce of course it goes bounce repeat stop it's really straightforward you can also go every 10 frames if you need to so for example if you are doing some rotoscoping you have 10 here you can go every 10 frames if you want to or you can change that value by changing it there as well that's also very important frames per second is the frame rate of your viewer but remember this is linked with the settings of your project which we're going to go through in a second and currently it's set to input not global so i think those are the most important things there's of course obviously more here we can zoom in zoom out using the wheel or of course using the wacom tablet which is how i normally comp i i usually use a wacom tablet because it's just much easier to just use a wacom tablet for compositing so and you can kind of like zoom in and zoom out obviously i'm not going to go through the settings on my wacom tablet but if you want if you know if i press the uh option or the option or the alt key i can kind of like you know drag the viewer zoom in and do things to it but it it's you can also right click and if you press the right click on the the image with the alt and then you can kind of like go go sideways but shortcuts are not the important thing you can kind of check those things later on we also have like safe zones if you want in guides we also have exposure meters to tell you what's overexposed if i switch this exposure meter for example here it shows you that this section is overexposed this behaves a bit like a zebra on a camera you know it tells you what's overexposed on the image but let's let's continue and as i go through things i will probably go through other stuff that we are not covering right now so that's the viewer now let's talk about the note graph and the note graph really i know that you can't see because i'm on front of it but i'm going to switch here but you see we also have like a little map here that allows you to kind of like go through and you can even make it bigger you can kind of like navigate through all the nodes obviously this script is quite small so it doesn't really matter and because we can kind of navigate here but you also can like zoom in and you again you can write right click with the alt and kind of like uh drag and go sideways on the on the note graph and one thing that you should know is that the way that you bring in nodes into nuke is very special so you can actually you know there's a couple of ways of bringing something so let's imagine that i have this image and i want to make it brighter not brighter on the viewer because that's just like a non-destructive method of making it brighter but i actually want to make it brighter for real you know so if i want to do that there's a couple of ways i can go in here to my color correction tab and i have a bunch of color corrector tools these are like plugins and tools that i have inside of nuke they're all coming with nuke and for example if you want you notice that like the most important nodes in nuke have like a little shortcut next to them so for example grade has g color correction has c like the most important nodes usually have you know roto is o roto roto paint is p uh you know read is r if you go to blur is a b so if you go to transform it's a t so there's a lot of like shortcuts related to a specific shortcut on the keyboard so for example if i want to do grade i can press the g button so if i'm on the on the note graph if i've last clicked on the note graph and i pressed the g button a grade node appears and this is a great note to do call correction now keep in mind that shortcuts in nuke behave differently from where you've last clicked so if i've last clicked on the viewer if i press the g button it actually changes to the viewer to only showing the green channel so for example r is the red channel green is the green channel the g button and then b is the blue channel so you can kind of see the different channels and this is really important because when you're doing compositing you want to watch the red channel and the green channel which are the majority of the time where the luminosity exists but then the green and the blue the green for the keying and the blue usually is the most noisy channel and that's where you actually see all the noise that the plate might have watching it on the blue channel is it tends to be you know where you see the the noise pattern so keep that in mind that when you last press on something that's where that shortcut becomes available so i'm going to press r again to go to color and again here for example if i press g it gets disagreed a grade note if i press b instead of blue channel it makes a blur now once i have a node there is this way that as i showed you i can go in here you know so there's three ways of doing nodes i can go in here and actually go into color correction and i can go and do grade that's great a note the other way of doing a grade note is to actually press the g button that's also a great note and there's another way a third way which is if i hit the tab button i can write something down so i can do grade and then you can kind of see these are all the nodes that start with grade and then if i press enter it makes a grade and if i hit the tab button again you notice that the last thing that i did was a great so that's the one that is still there and i can press the button and as you can see there's like a star system there's actually like a shortcut system if you want you can highlight some nodes that you use the most there's a lot of things that do that you know in that sense so now the way it works as well is that they always get disconnected by stuff if you just open them without clicking on something but if i've last clicked on the read node and i press the g button the grade note gets attached to the node okay so obviously you can still attach it and this is the cool thing about node compositing we're going to go through this in a second but you see node compositing is all about having options and having two things so you see for example here i have now two great notes and so what can i do with this so let's look at grade number one and then i'm let's gonna select this great note here grade number five it is on here on my viewer and then i have grade number one uh press two and now i have two grades so now if i go to my viewer and i press one and two i can swap and you can kind of see that nuke has highlights of what you're watching so if i press one i'm watching this great now if i press two i'm watching that great note so this is the way that you actually do options when you're doing some kind of compositing so for example if i now go into i double click and i open grade five this is the latest grade note that i'm changing so for example now um so for example let's go to grade five and as you can see here let's say that for example i want um pharrell to be brighter so i can go into the multiply and drag and now i have an image that is brighter now if i'm not happy with that if i go now to my grade two and i press grade two because you see if i press double double click on grade five grade five is now on the top of my settings properties if i double click on grade one now grade one is there so let's say grade one i'm actually gonna lower the exposure instead so now i have grade five which has a more brighter version and i have grade one which has a bro a darker version if i now go between them i can now see both versions at the same time including i can play them back and watch them playing back at the same time as well and this is where note compositing becomes so powerful because you can then have all these trees with different methodologies in different versions and then actually talk with your client and show your client do you like this version do you like that version there's like this kind of momentum going into composting where you actually have a note 3 and i know for some people here that don't know nuke it's always a bit tricky to get your head around the node compositing factor but keep in mind that we'll we'll get this done don't worry now i'm going to open another script because i want to show you really how powerful this becomes with node versus layers i'm going to open up the new script by the way keep in mind that what i have open here this is not part of nuke okay this is actually part of the interfa this is actually um you know my pipeline i have my own pipeline where basically you know i have my own tools i have my own plugins so don't expect to see this menu inside of nuke and because it is like a different thing that i've built on top because nuke is python based so you can build stuff on top uh quite easily so anyway i have something else here which i'm gonna comp real quick just to show you how nuke operates so and this is like from a short film i did years ago here's something that is very practical and i guess here to show you what an alpha channel is so this is a piece of cg i'm gonna set my viewer to input and so this is a piece of cg um which is of a monster going up uh it was done in cg by my lovely students at campus i-12 in sweden this was this is five years old and this was rendered in v-ray and as you can see this is like a like a monster that we have here in cg this is a render this is an exr inside of nuke and um at the moment this is what we call the multi-pass this is not a multi-pass exchange just a single exr but someone was asking about what an alpha channel is and and i guess the the thing that you'll see when you look at this image is that this read node here which is this one this render here you can kind of see that it has another little thing here which is a white box that is telling you that it has an alpha channel so that would be red green blue in alpha and so that's why it has an alpha channel now an alpha channel is what will tell you in nuke what a transparency is so if i press the a button on the viewer and notice how it changes here on the top you see here it says rgb right i'm going to just like bring the monster here to the face so you can kind of see that this is rgb and then we have red channel and then we have you notice how we have the rgb for red green blue alpha luminance and matte overlay so if i press a i see the alpha channel and it's the same thing if i go with the red channel with the r button the green channel with the green button the blue channel with the blue button a for alpha channel now this here is an alpha channel an alpha channel is basically telling nuke if someone was asking in the chat so an alpha channel is telling nuke or other applications doesn't it need to be nuke it could be like shake it could be like fusion it can be any after effects it tells nuke where it's transparent and where it's not transparent so where where it's white it's fully opaque where it's black it's fully transparent and so this is a file that that gives nuke that information of what is transparent so why is this important well this is important because if i want to merge something on the background then i need some kind of transparency so let me show you what i mean i'm going to just bring in a color so i'm going to go into my my read node and i'm going to go to the constant tab the constant by the way is just a a way of making a coloring nuke it's like a solid it's like solid um that you would have as well um so if i uh yeah yeah someone is asking about the green uh cache that's because it's cached locally onto my my solid state as well so as i said the constant is just like a solid and as you can see now it's black and and the reason for the solid to be in hd that's because the project settings of the of the of this shot is in hd and we're going to go through that in a second i'm just going to like swap the resolution to the same resolution as my video just so that that i can do that but i'll explain those things in a second so now i have a constant of black and and if i go in here you can kind of see i can make it white and i can make it gray or i can make it colors i'm only going to make it white so let's do it gray so zero point and 0.5 which is not grey by the way nuke because it's linear so uh i'll just like i'll just do like a random value of gray so this is gray which is a background and this is my footage they both have the same resolution now the the entire concept of nuke the entire concept around nuke is something that we call a over b okay so this is done with the merge node the merge node can be found on the menu of merging where we have all the ways of merging something and on this situation i'm going to press the m button for a merge you can also type the tab button and do merge and this is how you do a merge node merge nodes are basically a over b something that goes on the background something goes to the foreground and and so at this stage what i'm going to do i'm going to just reverse these two and the the concept of compositing a nuke really goes down and it's basically this merging two things because there's no layering system so we have a merge so in this situation the b is for background so i'm gonna press b into the constant a to the foreground uh in nuke and that will be the result of this merge so now if i press 1 you can kind of see that now the monster is comped on gray and why is it comped on gray it's compton grey because of the alpha channel you see because like i said the alpha channel whatever is white on the alpha channel is producing opacity full opacity whatever is black is producing full transparency and obviously in between when you see gray values that is me transparency because obviously that is the motion blur that we baked in into the scene and so now you can kind of see that now this is comped together on grayscale on the gray background so that would be how i would merge this okay so i know we're going really basic but that's the whole point right okay anyway let's uh let's also start by setting up my uh setting up like a project so we're gonna comp this we're gonna comp this plate which is one of my students by the way and wayne comp display to one of my students pretty scared of this monster so we're going to comp the monster into this shot these are all my students from campus i12 they did a lovely job with makeup as you can see and and we did like a like a concept short film it wasn't really a short film it was more like a concept and yeah so someone was asking if this is progress 444 no this is progress 444 because there's no alpha channel when you film of course cameras don't get alpha channels unfortunately right first things first i'm going to save this as a project so i'm going to do this i'm going to go because i want to save it and i'm going to go through the saving process and also getting the pro the project settings scaled up so i'm going to do file and i'm going to save as so this is obviously has been saved already but i'm going to save it somewhere else i'm going to save it just on my desktop because we're just doing this for the sake of it when we're not doing this for real and for any production and i'm going to do a new folder on and this is going to be the folder is going to be called stream and i'm going to press ok so now when you save something inside of nuke um you basically want to consider naming it in a specific way so i'm going to name this let's say monster comp like monster underscore comp i'm going to always going to put it under the score reason i put an underscore on the name of the file because i want to make sure um i don't screw any scripting or any problems with python scripting so i'm going to do that and then i'm going to put this v001 and that is going to be then dot nk which is nuke and so this is going to be my misspelled monster monster so monster underscore comp v1 the reason i put v1 here is because there is an automated way of nuke saving version so i'm going to just press save and now if i press you can't see it here but you see if i don't run nuke in rules in full screen you can kind of see it says here monster comp v1 so that's the name of the script on nukex i'm running new kicks at the moment but you can you don't need to run nuke x of course um so the way this is going to work now is i'm going to now now that i've saved it notice how if i go in here i can of course do save with of course control save control s but if i want i can do save new version if i press save new version because you have here save comp save compass save new version if i press save new version notice how now the script is called v2 so that's why i put 0v002 because i want nuke to automatically name my my script and if i go to my desktop here if i go to my desktop here you see now these other two scripts i saved so that's why i do the v because then i can automatically just keep doing versions and i would really recommend you to do a lot of versions inside of nuke because nuke is really crashy it crashes all the time it's really unstable sometimes it you lose work so i would recommend you to actually um really version up and now one cool thing about nuke is that the actual file is nothing more than a text file i'll show you this so if i drag this into a text editor and you'll see that this is actually what the script is you see this is the actual script and you can actually see the stuff here you see this is the actual the actual root and then we have a backdrop then we have a read node then we have a grade node remember we even have the values of the grade node we have a read node another reformat another great node these all the nodes that exist in nuke and the cool thing about this is that you can copy paste text in between so if i would have now copy pasted this imagine that i copy paste just this section here for example so i copy paste this read node like let's copy paste this great note so if i copy paste this great note here and i copy and i go to nuke here i can actually paste it into nuke so you can copy paste text into nuke so you can message people scripts you can actually read scripts you can actually copy paste it put it on on on an email you can send it on a messenger the only thing you need to be careful is that it has to be uh not on rich text it has to be without rich text it has to be simple text okay and so so um keep that in mind anyway now that we've saved i'm only gonna i'm only gonna keep the stuff that i need and so i'm gonna delete this stuff here because i don't wanna use it so i only have the cg here and and now i'm gonna the next thing i'm gonna do is i'm gonna and this is really important okay don't don't forget to do this okay so when you have a shot like this you need to consider what your output will be okay so obviously this was filmed in 4k this was filmed in 4k because this was filmed with the black magic camera okay so it was filmed in with a black magic camera in 4k with full sensor normally when you do visual effects you do that you usually like render out like you film with more resolution than you need because you might need to scale you might need to track you might because remember every time you you have some kind of problem with stabilization or if you need to scale up or if you need to blow up a scene you'll lose resolution right so you film with the best resolution possible and then you select your output now we did the same thing with cg this cg was rendered in two and a half k the reason why it's rendered in two and a half k is because we were going to deliver it in two and a half k we normally render the cg at the delivery format sometimes we render with a few more pixels just to compensate for example if you have lens distortion that you need to apply to it so in a way like sometimes we do something that we called an over scan an overscan would allow you to basically have enough resolution on the sides of the image so that you can apply the lens distortion and still have enough resolution to take it over i'm sure i'm confusing people quite a lot but i'm just like trying to explain as we go and i understand that this becomes a bit complicated but you know you guys can always watch this video again and and obviously i have more videos on my youtube channel as well and obviously you can sign up to my course as well my course goes through all these things um one thing that you need to consider is the settings of your project okay that's really important first thing you need to do is to do settings you know most important thing is the project settings on nuke on the project so project settings can be found on either if you go into edit project settings over there project settings of this project or you can press the s button once the s button opens this is the project setting so as you can see here the name of the script you can make some comments you know for example done by hugo if you are sharing this script with other people you can make comments here and then we have here which is this is really important this this is really where the magic happens okay so we need to first of all uh sign up for a range of where we're gonna comp and obviously the range depends on the cg right so the cg is 1001 to 1128 that's the range that i have and so i'm going to do that i'm going to start and 1001 and i'm going to end at 1028 i'm also going to lock my range the reason why it's important for you to lock the range is because if you don't lock this every time you bring something new from another plate it will change the range so if you imagine if you brought in a plate that was 2000 frames long the frame range would change to 2000 so if you don't want that to happen if you want to lock your frame rate for frame range for delivering then you need to lock it also i know this was not 25 it was 24 frames per second that's the fact i know that was done like that and then in here i know i'm zoomed in too much sorry about that um so i did like zoom in a bit less but um but as you can see here we also have resolutions and this is of course all the resolutions we can have inside of nuke it you can pick there's a lot of presets of course but for simplicity's sake i'm going to keep hd okay let's say that we want to deliver an hd version of this render you know we want to deliver it in hd we don't want to deliver in more than hd so i'm going to set hd to the resolution of my comp now here's where a lot of confusion comes from people trying to use nuke for the first time you're probably thinking okay i've set because this is not after effects right so you're probably thinking okay i've set my resolution but why do i still see 4k on the plate and that's a really conscious thing like nuke does have this and the reason for this is because nuke is resolution free you know it's like um it's resolution independent okay because it's resolution independent and it doesn't really care uh if you are using 4k hd or nothing you can bring in a 20k plate you can bring in a 10k plate because you're reading it from file and as a as you can see here the the the the comp the cg is still 2 and a half k my my plate is still 4k although my settings are hd why is this important well it's important if i do something else let's imagine now i bring in a constant remember i was doing a constant for the caller i'll bring in a constant and let's say that we make a great constant again i'm going to press the 1 to attach to the constant and you see this content is set to hd so you're probably thinking why is it set to hd well it's set to hd because my project settings are set to hd so everything that is created by nuke itself either being a roto shape either being a constant or a transform node or a reformat node or a rotoscope node anything that you construct inside of nuke will always be hd reformatter will be hd the transform node will be set to hd the roto will be set to hd and this is really important because this is where nuke is different from other applications that's where you have a project setting which is the setting of your delivery but also this resolution is the setting of your comp so anything you do to this comp by either a rotoscope transform or a constant will have that resolution so that's why you need to be careful because if you don't really pay attention to the resolution that you're going to deliver you need to be careful because then everything else in nuke will have different resolutions always remember the resolution is incredibly important okay incredibly important um for you to set up this this composite so let's pretend for a moment that i'm going to deliver hd now there's other things here we're not going to go through them today because we don't have time there's also management i'm not going to go through management because i'm currently using the default management obviously there is aces as well but please keep in mind that this render which is from 2015 does not have aces because this was rendered in 2015 we didn't use aces back then and also this plate is actually rendered from da vinci without asus either as well so keep in mind that that i'm not going to run asus today although you have seen tutorials of me on aces i i remember a few years back i did a stream on bank u with aces so maybe have a look at that you know um and obviously like victor perez is always doing a lot of things with aces you know and you can kind of check some of these wonderful tutorials on netflix as well and there's a lot of information there now that we've established this how do we make this work right because remember we're trying to comp something this two and a half k and we're comping something to the 4k but we're delivering hd right so as a rule when you're compositing something like this you kind of want to consider okay i want to merge these two right remember i pressed the m button for the merge button and so i want to merge the monster into the plate and okay so the plate is the background that's fine remember always b is for background and a is for foreground and then i'll put the monster now obviously in nuke the way it works is that if you had another layer then you would have merged something else and something else and something else we'll probably get to that but just so you guys know like like you know that's the kind of thing and it works and um you know you can kind of like merge and merge emerge that's how you basically grow it as a tree you know you go through it as a tree and i should have really like made like a huge comp just to show you a tree i guess but i'll get to there here's the problem the first problem so you're probably thinking okay i've merged the 4k plate with the two and a half k plate of the monster let's view what we've done okay let's watch our fabulous composite oh the viewer is like i don't usually work like this and by the way i'm gonna ask you for a favor like i don't i hate working like this i hate to have such a small note graph and i hate to have all the properties here if you guys don't mind i'm going to switch the workspace to my own workspace now i'm not going to teach you how to change workspaces that's really easy you can find it on the on on the web you can find it on foundry but i'm going to switch to this this is how i work doesn't mean that it's the best way no not at all like that's how i prefer to work okay i like to have a very big note graph on this side and i have to have like to have a very big screen on this side and then i like to have all my properties actually being individual menus i like this because that allows me to have two of them side by side if i want to transfer data so i prefer to have floating and you know i really prefer to have floating so once i'm here remember we were discussing okay i have a 4k plate i have a two and a half k monster i'm going to merge it and look at that for some reason the monster is not scary at all like the monster actually looks ridiculous not only the monster looks ridiculous but also for some reason it's also not working properly now well you see i play back nothing is working and you probably like thinking oh my god what the hell did i do well first of all you need to change this input to global the reason for that is because you remember we set the settings to global so we have a locked setting of 1001 to 11 11828 and so now that now should work and but obviously there's something wrong right because the monster is really tiny now the reason for the monster to be really tiny is because nuke always carries the resolution from the background plate okay so whatever is attached to the b pipe would be the resolution of the incoming composite and that's why when you look at the monster the monster is not scary at all it's like like a little monster and so in fact what happens here is that you actually need to adjust the size of either the monster needs to be bigger or the plate needs to be smaller because we're delivering hd there is no point of us using the plate in 4k no point at all except if you needed the 4k you know usually i i can form plates in 4k when i'm kind of considering that maybe i need the extra resolution for keying or maybe i need the extra resolution you know for tracking or i need the extra resolution for maybe like some kind of stabilization that i'm trying to do in this case i'm not doing any of that uh i mean obviously there are some tracking markers to be removed here but it's not like we need the 4k so i'm going to start by reducing the resolution of this plate now to reduce the resolution of this plate i have a few ways if i go to the transform tab the way that you want to do this is on something called the reformat node now remember what i said on the beginning i'm jumping a lot in a lot of things as you probably noticed look at all these nodes i really would recommend you to go through a course because a lot of things will be really over like i will not talk about them because i can't do this i mean remember my course is 70 hours long as i was saying the reformat so i'm gonna go in here and you see here's another thing to consider when you put the reformat node you see the reformat node automatically picks up the resolution of your settings because we've set it to full hd so you can either have it like this and then plug it into the pipe if you want to or you can select the read node and type reformat now consider that when you do this when you type it to the reformat it will always pick up the resolution of the incoming plight so so now that i have a reformat here let's have a look at exactly what happened so as you can see on the image here this is not quite what we wanted right so as you can see here we have we have hd but for some reason we have this bounding box issue and in fact if i go in here and i click the black outside look at this like it's actually cropped right that's not going to work well the reason for this is happening is because the black magic cinema the old black magic camera was actually not 16x9 it was i don't know why it was like some kind of weird whatever they were making it was like 1920 by by 10 60 expert ratios like i guess like that's like 19 by nine and a half i have no idea what they were thinking anyway and so that's a problem and that's because the reformat note has basically three types of reformatting you can do reformatting where you actively choose the resolution so you know that's actually now doing 720p or you can do full hd or you can do 4k or you can do 1k you know you can pick whatever resolution you prefer to deliver obviously if you're picking up a larger resolution you're going to crop the image and you're going to stretch the image you need to be careful with those things and that's kind of why why we're doing this why we have a 4k plate okay we can choose the output or we can just use hd now that's one way of formatting the other way is to box in box of course we just tell them exactly what we want so let's say i want let's say i want specifically 400 by 200 you know pixels why not um you know or i can do scale and scale allows me to just scale down or scale up by the factor of one so for example and notice how nuke is really i'm going to say first before i do this nuke is really in the indifferent in terms of resolution so if i go all the way look look at this i'm scaled by 10. so now this is a 40k image okay so this is now 40 000 pixels by 21 000 pixels obviously when i play it back it's really slow it's really slow because now it's a 40k which i guess it's what we're gonna shoot when blackmagic launches a camera next year because they're already at 12k so since they're already at 12k i'm sure they're gonna get 40k soon let's see what would happen if this was 12k so i'm scaling actively obviously now i'm just blowing up pixels i'm not really i'm just like basically scaling into 20k which is pointless but it's so slow by the way so even with my double double machine dual dual gpu it's still slow so let's do 12k actually let's do 12k and it is also slow but it's probably not as slow i guess yeah it's not as slow so it would be fine and but yeah so notice how this is so big now that it doesn't even cache remember it doesn't even cache at 12k i think nuke is struggling with this thing so let's just go back to one here and let's not have that so so this is the different ways you can scale you can actually either format to a specific scale you can do a box and put a specific format or actually scale by hand to a specific res this is really handy especially when you are applying lens distortion because then you can scale to a factor of whatever lens distortion you're trying to achieve and and so it's it's also very powerful in that sense um so for the purpose of this tutorial i'm going to do format and remember these problems are coming because the resize type is width right so if i now would put to height it would zoom in if i were to put fit it would fit into that frame of 16 by nine if i would fill it would zoom in as well if i would distort it would distort the image to actually be part of that resolution that he's trying to force the plate into and and of course if i put none this is where i get the actual 4k plate just zoomed in so this is now one to one in 4k so it's basically we're watching the 4k plate on a window of hd so that's kind of like the the way that it works here so obviously what i want here is i'm gonna want to resize to to basically to height obviously the problem though is that as you can see it zoomed in on the sides so there's a bit of an issue here with the tracking and the cg not that it will be a problem for this specific shot but the issue here is because my resolution of my cg you know in here is two and a half k by 1382 which the same aspect ratio as my you know the same aspect ratio as my footage so what exactly what you want to do is actually to use the formatting to match the cg at least for now that's what i would do on a plate like this remember of course this has huge implications once you reformat something you're going to lose that extra information on the on the bottom but when you merge the cg basically what you want to do is you want to do everything in 4k so that means stabilization would be done here tracking would be done here king would be done here everything at 4k and then only when you're ready to merge it with the cg that's when you reformat only then do you reformat the plate if in fact the plate is the same like bigger than the cg only if that's the case you know i don't want to confuse you here too much but it's like really difficult to render in 4k so it would be very unlikely that someone would render this in 4k it's really painful so most of the times we render in 3k or we render in three and a half k we a lot of times render below 4k and then don't tell anyone it's a secret please don't tell netflix not i've ever i've never done a show to netflix but i mean forces people to do 4k in everything but obviously i know that a lot of companies don't do 4k because they can't do it it's just too much it's too much rendering it's too much power to be just wasted on render time like that um you know so so it's very common for you to basically render on a lower resolution so obviously i'm not going to deliver 4k i'm going to deliver hd so none of this matters even i could have even delivered this resolution if i wanted to so what i'm going to do here to match this up is i'm going to choose the same resolution so if i open up this here this is now 20 25 60 by 1482 i'm now going to pick that resolution so if i go all the way down here it is here because nuke has all these samp like these templates these are the resolutions that are templated inside of nuke but below here the ones that have no label those are the ones of just stuff that you imported into nuke so whenever you import something it will show up here so keep that in mind so i'm going to pick the same one which is 2560x1382 and now my footage is now correctly converted to the same resolution as the monster and if i know merge both you can kind of see that the monster is now on the correct place obviously this is just over a over b and i'm at the beginning of the of the shot monster is not even there so i'm i'm going to do an in and out here so we don't waste so much time watching this i'm going to press the i button to make an in point here and then we're just going to preview just the comp itself going back to the shot so now this is the comp we have right so this is what we call a pre-comp this is what we call an a over b so now we have the monster there and we have the merge version here and everything works the resolution is now correct now for the moment i'm not going to actually put hd here and actually temporarily i'm actually going to just to make everything more simple and before i deliver i'm actually going to change my settings the project settings to the resolution of my cg because i want to make sure my rescales and my reformats and my rotos and my transforms all match to the resolution of my project so i'm going to change here this resolution to this so that that time if i put a transform node or if i put another reformat node or if i put another roto shape node you know everything will always have that resolution you see the roto actually has 2560 by 1382 and the reformat as well so that everything is kind of matching so now that that's merged that's my pre-comp here and this is why i was showing you how powerful compositing and node compositing is now notice how this is actually a tree and when you press the command or control button you get these little dots that allows you to like organize this a bit better i like to organize my script so that they are a bit more tidy and a bit more organized so that you can kind of like continue working obviously if you press the the the dot button you also have a dot as well if you want to you can have more dots that's just like organization point of view but the reason why i was why i was doing this was because i wanted to show you the power of of node scripts you know how you can actually do so many different changes you know you know do so many different changes in the fly and actually tweak things on the fly as well so let's say that for example i'm sitting with the director and i want to experiment a bit so let's say the time you now select this and i copy paste it and okay so i now have two comps and because nuke works in a way that it's reading the file from from disk so nuke is reading the file from disk which means the file is not actually cached physically it's actually not being converted to some weird format like a flame would do or like avid would do so it doesn't really matter how many versions of the same image you have because it's always reading the same file if you look at the read file the read file is pointing to the same exact position so this is actually the path in the computer of this sequence okay so the powerful thing about this is that now i can do multiple versions and show my clients so let's say that the client would say okay i need this guy to be blurry okay that's fine obviously i'm not saying i would use i would just use a defocus note i would probably use a zd focus note but if i just want to like experiment something really quick i can just put a defocus note here the focus node is part of the blur tab which is the filtering tab where you have all the nodes that have to do with filtering and blurring and so in this sense if you go in here and you put the focus node you see that i can defocus the image okay so now let's say that i defocus a lot like let's say that we need focus maybe 10 that's the focus amount that i have okay and so that's version number one let's say that then my client wants to also have a new version so i'm going to go back to this script here and i'm going to copy paste because all the nodes can be copy pasted right so i can copy paste this focus node select the monster paste it here and now i have another the focus node and let's say that now this one is on 20 for example so okay so now my client is okay this is version 20 and remember the viewer is set to one on my viewer here from this merge node i can select this merge node and press two and now i have both of them so now i can like put this in full screen and show my client okay this is with 10 this is with 20. and in fact i can even play it back and i while i'm playing back i can swap around between them and remember i have full frame processing here and once it's cached once both of them are cached because i have to wait for them to both cache so now i'm going to cache the second one so you see it it can cache both of them at the same time which is really cool and in fact if you wait a little bit now this is going to take a bit of time because obviously it's caching both of them so now i have one and two so now i can actually jump by pressing you see here pressing one two and two one two and i can view it at the same time and play it back at the same time and this is really powerful when you're like debating this with clients you know and this is why note compositing is so powerful because you can kind of like copy paste stuff all the time give another example like imagine that you put a great note here and obviously we're going to go through pre-multiplication in a second because there's of course rules of multiplication that we need to keep in mind to do something like this but but if i put a great note here and let's say that for example the client wants the monster to be a bit brighter you know like let's say that he wants the for some weird reason he wants the monster to be a bit brighter or he wants the monster to have like a little color into it you know let's say that the monster they want the monster to be a bit warmer so or maybe a bit colder let's say they want the monster to be a bit cool cooler i'll i'll talk about color correction in a second but you see so that now that's the version with the cooler and and the cool thing about this is that because it's nodes i can still view my original i can still then you know by just pressing one that's why note compositing is is quite powerful because you see i'm now viewing this monster because i've pressed one into my viewer right you can kind of see it graphically here but then if i press the defocus if i select the focus and press one now i'm watching just the focus and if i press one on the grade i'm just now just watching the grade then you can even play it back so i'm now just watching the monster i'm now just watching the defocus and i'm now just watching the grade note and you can't really do this very easily this quickly in a layer based compositor because on layer based you have to like switch off a layer and switch on a layer switch off a layer and you can't really quickly view things like this unless you have buffers you know i think that's the the thing so and the same way that you can even see the result and the cool thing about this is that you can also like switch things really quickly on the fly so if you're working with a client next to you or even if you're the experimenting thing because i do think that nuke is becomes a very experimental application because of this and think about this like nuke you know anything i'm teaching here can be still used on fusion because fusion is also a node based compositor so you can also use it in shake although shake doesn't exist anymore but but these things are not just for nuke you can do these kind of things in fusion as well which is free okay so let's go back to this and before we stop the break the other thing also that is really powerful with this not only you can view just one layer just another layer just another layer but also by pressing the d button which is the button for disable if you select something you can disable a node really quickly in fact you can disable two nodes at the same time you can disable just no one node you can disable just the other node and this becomes incredibly powerful when you're working really quickly and i think that's why so many people love node compositing so let's say that let's carry on here let's do another example here so on this one here let's imagine the client wants it to be a bit warmer instead and let's say the client for some weird reason asked me to scale the monster a little bit more you know let's let's just pretend that so you see how quickly i've now done two versions and i have both of them side by side here so the next time client comes in i can just show them right away the difference between the two of them uh by just doing a b a b a b and i can also like disable one of them disable the other disable the other as well so i can actually use the disable button to my advantage and really kind of like go quite fast in terms of compositing and be quite creative i think that's why i love node based compositing and to appoint it now i'll be honest i hardly use photoshop these days especially if i'm just comping layers like i just use nuke instead it's just much easier than using photoshop this is one of the advantages of really having node compositing because in again like i said like it is possible for you to do exactly what i'm doing here in fusion okay just keep that in mind as i was debating it's really cool because you can kind of like start doing multiple versions you can kind of like do versions where you disable something and enable something great something but obviously this is scratching the surface right so this is really really just really scratching the surface because nuke has so much more to offer so having said that i'm gonna change a bit the conversation just for a little while here and talk a little bit about um why also nuke is so you know used in the industry for cg compositing and the reason for that is because of the way that it handles channels okay so for that i'm going to um i'm going to open up a script here um so that we can kind of go through that real quick here so i'm just going to open up a new new script and going to go into this fella here so i'm just going to kind of like let's see here yeah so i'm going to just like do this one here so let me just give you a second yeah so um so this is the this is the same so this is the same project um you know the same project that we were doing on the other shot but this time this is another shot of course so this is like this shot here obviously this is not comped um this monster should have been behind these guys so you need to roto these people so they are in front and so that's the other thing as well so i'm going to just like set up the range here so i can show you what i mean when i'm talking about multi-pass compositing so i'm just going to like change the range here and change it to the same range as the other shot so also i'm setting it to 24 frames per second so that we can kind of like use it um so obviously this comp is much more complex because you would have had to rotoscope the people to be in front you would have to like address the depth of field you'd have to like address a lot of the things so i am i'm going to talk just a little bit about channels and and how that operates inside of nuke because that is really part of pivotal in the way that you composite cg compositing and i love that my students because they knew that this guy was going to be in front rotoscope because the monster should be behind these people notice how the animation just goes that's so funny look at that the animation just kind of goes like that it's so funny but that's just because like i said like we knew that he was going to be comped behind these people not in front so so this monster here um which is supposed to be comp behind this is a bit of a different render from the last one we saw this is again a v-ray render still but one of the advantages that nuke has to other types of softwares is the way that it operates with channels and again don't don't forget don't forget that i keep saying this but it is i'm skipping a lot of things okay so you guys are not going to really be fully working with new capture you watch the stream it's it's like you need to kind of like like watch other things and do other courses but but the way that this works is that you have access to a lot of layers because when you render something in the cg package that has multi-pass exrs or multi-pass uvs you then try you then tend to have something like this like remember we always have rgba here which is like the red channel the blue channel the green channel and then the alpha channel as we discussed before but nuke has the capability of bringing extra layers in the same exr in this situation for example here we have the global illumination i'm going to just just going to brighten that up a little bit so you can see it a bit better so this is a global illumination which is nothing more than the bounce light of the environment we have the sub-surface scattering which is basically the smear transparency of the skin we then have the fire shot so this is like from the front fire light then we have the diffuse itself which is just the color with no shadows with no reflections with no um with nothing extra and no lights as well so this is what we call the raw diffuse then of course we have the light from the left we then have the front fireplace light as well we have then the full light as well then we have the fire back left back we have then the firefront left then we have the warm light so the all of these that i'm showing you these are basically like light passes and euvs that you usually render from a cg package you know so from a cg package you render all these aovs and then you bring them into nuke to composite them and they are very helpful because they allow you to control little things like addressing more light to the left or more light the right and they allow you to do small tweaks without having to re-render everything again you know like so that's kind of the whole point of this is for you to not have to like go back to 3d all the time and obviously i know that these days like with the advent of real-time engines and the advent of you know a redshift everything is getting faster and faster and faster but we still need to output these things because it's still faster to tweak a light in comp than it is to go to 3d tweak the light and then render everything again at this moment it's still faster obviously that will change like there will be a moment where real-time engines will be faster and redshift will be faster and perhaps you'll be able to render quicker so that means that you don't need to bring all these layers like that that's kind of what unreal is trying to do and really is trying to make it so that you don't have to care about these aovs but remember though that we're always chasing our tails right so yes right now if you're working in hd you can use unreal it's all in real time but 4k is a bit of a stretch and then let's start talking about 8k and then we go back to offline rendering because as the resolution grows the render engines don't don't have enough power and so we tend to go always back to brute frost rendering that happened when we switched from sd to hd 720 to hd and then from hd to 4k and now it will do again when we switch from 4k to 8k so i think often on offline rendering compositing and the way that you work in with aovs and everything will not really change much because resolutions just keep going with imax and and you'll just need multi-pass exrs you know uh so so yes georgie to answer your question these are your visas are nested as one exr yes they are not separated so in nuke you can work in both ways you can have an exr that has everything nested like you said or you can just work with everything separated where you have layer by layer by layer rendered out you know and oh look at that nuked crashed i was wondering when we were gonna have a crash in nuke and i guess we just got one so i need to open nuke again um well that was that was nice look at that new crashing like that um so this is why i uh save all the time because nuke does crash quite a lot um i don't even know why it crashed there's no real reason for it to crash i'm not even using i'm not even using like i'm using like basically obs is using about 10 of my cpu so it's not like that would have been the reason but i don't know like that's why you save just to open this up where was i i was on this one i think yes by the way nukes auto saves if you don't change the mouse it also saves every five seconds i believe something like that so nothing to worry about there and basically we were not even doing anything we were just like oh actually wait a minute this is not the script is it no no this is the script yes it is um so it doesn't really matter um as i was saying so yeah like we were having like a big discussion about like like because people ask me all the time oh what about redshift is it going to change things is it going to make it different well not really like like unreal and redshift or really cool and especially in real is really cool but and will still can't really make a proper 32-bit float or 16-bit float render with high quality dynamic range and you can still it's still a bit of a hoop to do aces rendering obviously this might change in the future so if you're listening to this in the future never mind what i've said but at the moment it's um even rich even rich people's new crash of course like it doesn't matter which machine you're using doesn't matter how powerful the machine is new crashes all the time it does but that's normal like every application crash and the only thing you do is you open it up again i don't think i don't care about a machine crashing i don't really care about new crashing i feel like when you're dealing with some something that is so high-end it's like a formula one car think about it like i always give people this comp like this comparison you know if you look at formula one formula one is the fastest car in the world right but it's so fragile you know like so anything can break it and then it just stops working so i feel like it's kind of the same thing you know like i feel like nuke is a bit like that it's like a formula one car it's so advanced and it's pushing the the pixels so much in 2d that it kind of drops out and okay so so these would be all the passes and you also have reflections i also have refractions which in this case it doesn't really exist because there's no refraction because e is like skin he's not no no no glass self-illumination there's no cell phonation there's some shadows as well and then some specular and that's it really so these are all the passes i have and i also have like some other passes like like in this situation we also have like passes like like you know well we'll go through them in a minute and we have also like depth passes and what i'm showing you here these are what we call beauty passes which are the passes that will allow you to do the render itself so but the way that nuke operates is really peculiar because you see when i'm merging something here like when i'm merging this monster and i obviously i know that this is not matching you see like we need to like work on the blur and the focus none of these things are matching but that's not the point i'm just teaching you nuke i'm not really like going through it in detail right now on this shot um so the way that this works is that the channels are always there right like so the channels are always there we always have access to the channels but when i when i do something to an image inside of nuke like imagine that i do a great note here and you see on every node in nuke whenever you're operating on some level like even if you're doing a great note notice how if i make it brighter or if i change the gamma for example like like if i change the am i affecting that image you see it says here channel rgb that means i'm affecting the rgb so let's say for a moment just for the sake of it let's say that we multiply this by 10 so we have a super overexposed monster here notice how the rgb which is the the main layer of my multi-pass exr is overexposed but if i go and go into for example the sub scattering notice how it's not overexposed and that the reason for that is because an exr you know an exr does not um you know has the multi-pass it has all the layers but those layers are not being affected by the main stream think of it like imagine you have several pipes of plumbing and we're only affecting the plumbing one of the pipes we're only affecting the pipe that has the rgb we're not affecting the pipe that has the substance of scattering obviously i can change that i can do the grade node and i can tell the gradient can you should affect everything that's fine and now it's affecting all my channels including the gi including the fuse including the beauty including everything or i can just tell them to just affect one specific channel but here's the kicker here and that's why this becomes confusing just notice here for example when i'm looking here i'm looking at this read note and then i look at the grade note that affects the sub sub scattering when i look at that grade note notice how the sub sub scattering did not get brighter it did not get better it did not become better the reason for that is because this great node is literally just affecting that pass it's just affecting that pipe and it does not contribute to the general pipe that exists inside of nuke so it's not contributing the beauty the reason for that is because for you to be able to change things on the fly you actually have to do what we call in the industry rebuilding the beauty basically compositing all the auvs together to have the result that we already had okay so yeah now one thing i'm i must say because people are debating aces and asoe and in the chat don't forget that i am not running asus because this is an old render and i'm actually in fact running an srgb lut on my viewer because i'm just broadcasting on youtube normally i work in rex and z09 but we're not doing that because i'm actually working for the stream you know i'm streaming on youtube and streaming on youtube is much better to stream in srgb because that's what most people watch in their computers they watch in srgb so that's why i'm doing that and so now to show you this i think i need to open a script i have i prepared the script already and just to kind of show you this i have a question on the chat here which is really loaded what's the difference between the srgb and rexella nine well the difference is not much tell you that srgb and rex design are almost the same but the difference is because rexim09 is the curve the lut that is for delivery for tv and commercials and broadcast and srgb is if you want to deliver for the web that's because most monitors are set to srgb when you're viewing a desktop but a tv is set to rexon9 so they have slightly different gamma levels and slightly different color variants they're very similar very very similar to a fact that if you put them side by side they look exactly the same like oh yeah maybe this will be enough to show here so now it's a bit messy here but srgb is the blue one and rexella nine is the pink one and notice like this is the spectrum of light the visible light okay and so uh srgb uh only can see the light inside this this this pyramid here so any value outside this pyramid is not possible to be viewed by srgb because srgb is really limited it's not really good in terms of color spice and so that means that for example this type of green is not possible but notice how pink is rex in zone 9 and blue is srgb notice how it's almost the same so reximuzo 9 has just a little bit more darks has just a little bit less blues and so it's just like a little offset by srgb but it's almost the same but compared to for example dc dcp which is dcp is like what we see on the cinema which is the blue one which has a huge range of color really going off topic now this is like much much more advanced than what we are going through here i will explain this by hand don't worry but just like i said here you see this is another render that also is similar to the one i was showing you like this is actually from a project i did years ago for a game and again we also have the same stuff you know we have the diffuses and we have the speculars and we have all the control we would have the subsurface scattering we still have all the control of those passes and now the concept of using cg compositing in nuke would be very similar to this way where you would comp and merge all these passes so that you rebuild the beauty okay so i'll give give an example i'm going to put the viewer where's the viewer the viewer is like really far away all the way up here i'm going to show you i'm going to start by showing you a more simple render that is a bit more simplified okay so let's talk about this one this is redshift by the way that what i'm going to show you so this is redshift so this is a redshift render and i'm going to just like put on input here and and so you can kind of see that this is the this is the raw 3d that we got from redshift so it's not treated there's no like like you know depth of field it's really the materials it's just like the raw stuff but you see that we don't like all the uvs um or here merge together and obviously these ones are not they are separate separate exrs but just to show you the point like in here we have like just a diffuse and then we have just the gi and then we have just a reflection and we have just the specular then we have just the refraction and then we have just the scattering and all those kind of things and the cool thing about this is that that then if you merge them all together in a certain way you basically get a match you know so for example now my viewer i'm viewing this versus that and as you can see it matches perfectly so this is what we call in the industry a rebuild we're rebuilding all these aovs and shuffling them out and so if i go back to the statue here it would be the same thing as well if i now look at the statue and i look at the result of the statue you see notice how i have a match as well so if i look at a b i have a complete match now you're probably thinking like but hugo what's the what's the freaking point right what's the freaking point of you doing all this crap just to have the same image well remember when i was showing you the fact that if if i go in here you know and i and i have like imagine that i have the sub surface scattering remember when i said okay let's put a grade note here and i want to change the sips of the scattering so i'm going to in the grade note change the channel to just support the steps of scattering and then i'm going to multiply up the subservice scattering and notice how nothing happens on the image but if i go to the subset of the scattering pass it's actually brighter now you see now the way the nuke works is that when you're doing this you're compositing on a different channel so you that's why nuke is so powerful because you can kind of like comp in different channels you can comp on just one channel on just the other channel and so a lot of times we do a rebuild because we want to tweak something so what's the point of this well i'll show you what what you can do with something like this so for example here's the subsurface scattering alone and now if i put a merge node here on the subsurface scattering just on the system scattering for example and now i look at this sub surface scattering and i'm thinking okay i want the subsurface scattering maybe to be a bit stronger so i'm going to mid-tone it a bit so i'm going to basically just like increase the mid-tones of it and maybe make it slightly brighter you see on this great note i'm basically bringing the subsurface scattering up and so now if i look at the result of this you know so let's say that we look at the original that's the original and now i put my viewer on the result of that comp so notice now how my subsurface scattering is brighter because i've tweaked it but notice how the reflections are not and nothing else is and into a fact that i actually now because i have separated everything i can actually like tweak things to a really drainable level so let's say that on the sub-surface scattering i open that up and let's say that we want to remove the sub surface scattering so now there is no sub surface scattering so notice how i'm actually now actually tweaking at the shader level so now i've removed the substance of the scattering completely or i increase the scattering and and now this is look at this for example that's i'm going to go to the first frame here and look at this part here so if i remove it and now it gets me transparent because i'm applying the subsurface scattering in and out it's like a system it becomes it becomes like it becomes like a pipeline you know it's kind of like that really the same goes for like for example lights like imagine that you know if i look at my let's see here my reflections for example so if i put a grade note here and i decide to remove my reflections for example so if i put a grade note here and i now remove all my reflections well actually i think these are all from the specular probably so sorry i should have done there that there so if i go to my speculars here and i look at the results so if i now go into the the original and the new one notice how i now have the way to actually remove reflections so so you see i'm tweaking because i've made a system where i'm basically having layer by layer by layer i'm it's very easy for me to just basically remove completely one reflection or put back the reflection you see what i mean and in in fact i can even bring the reflection up so this is why it becomes so pivotal for you to in film use multi-pass exr so that you can actually tweak just a reflection or just a light or subscribing or just a certain element or a certain part of the script you know and i guess i guess you've seen this before on my streams and on my youtube channel and i do have a few videos like this but i just wanted to kind of go through it to the basics and and what i'm going to do now after the break is i'm going to comp and shuffle one of these multi-pia cxrs by hand so that you can kind of like so you can kind of see how it works okay yeah so the reason for red stalling is asking me why why is it still srgb that's because i'm doing something which i call a shuffle and we're going to go through this in a minute and but you see a shuffle is a way for you to shuffle a specific layer into the rgb level so i'm basically moving that layer from one channel into the other channel that's what i'm doing here and that's what i want to do by hand and you know that's why i i wanted to do it like manually so that you can see it and that's what we're gonna do next okay but in the meantime we're gonna do another break um you know whoever came up with multiplex cxr really did the directors of favor yes they did maybe they were a director maybe they were directors you

Channel: Hugo's Desk ™

Views: 46,675

Keywords: compositing, vfx, nuke, foundry, benq, training, tutorial, Hugo Guerra, Hugo's Desk, free, visual effects, fusion, nukex

Id: lL6d0-lQgZo

Length: 99min 52sec (5992 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 27 2021