finishing in Nuke (longish timelines)

[memo]

Hi All, this is gonna be another one of those ‘which app should I pick’ questions, but I have a very specific question.

I generally do (or oversee on a small scale) pretty much all aspects of post production – visual effects, grading, editing, compositing, motion graphics etc… and finishing short (1/2 – 4 minute) videos, promos, music videos, corporates etc. (can see more details on my reel – http://www.msavisuals.com/reel if interested).

So far my workflow has involved lots of apps – 3dsmax, cinema4d, premiere, FCP, motion, shake, combustion – I hate the fact that i’ve had to use so many, but each project had its own problems which suited different apps.

My situation now is that I’m looking to invest in one app which can replace aftereffects, shake & combustion (and to some level 3dsmax and cinema4d for basic 3D titles and gfx), and most importantly I can use as a ‘finishing’ app. So far I’ve generally edited the video in Premiere or FCP, and then imported the edit into AfterEffects or Combustion (with automatic duck) for finishing – or in some cases (most of the 30sec commercial promos), never even touched an editor and put the whole thing together in After Effects or Combustion with nested comps.

Now I’m quite fed up of the limitations of layers and am dying to switch to a Node based app – I’ve used Shake for comping shots and love it… and have tried the PLE of Nuke and Fusion and they are great too with extra features… but I was wondering how they can handle long timelines? (upto a few minutes). In Aftereffects or combustion long timelines are no problem at all as they can be organised really well with nesting comps, but is anything similar possible with Nuke? Even if it is, I guess importing my edit will be a problem as Automatic Duck dont support Nuke! So for 3-4 minute videos its probably out of the question anyway. But I have a 30 second commercial coming up soon, which will have very few cuts and will mainly be ‘smooth transitions’ (logan style) from one scene to the next, which traditionally I would have done with After Effects or Combustion straight up without using an Editing app – it would be great if it was possible (and feasible!) to do it in Nuke (or Fusion)…

Any advise on this issue would be much appreciated…

cheers,

[bnw]

Unfortunately what you probably really want is a Smoke 🙂 But I’d be interested to hear people’s experiences finishing in desktop compositors too… I’ve had to edit things together in Shake before and it just is not fun.

[Gregory Hill]

Yea I know flame/smoke would be ideal… but unfortunately they’re a bit above my budget!

Fusion and Nuke seem sooo close (running on an 8core/raid) to what I need that its frustrating not to be able to go that one step further and finish the whole spot in the same app!

All that I really need extra (or what I havent figured out how to do yet) is to be able select a bunch of nodes and group them (analogous to a nested Combustion composition), then give that group a start time – is something like that possible? Or is there any other way a 30 second video like http://www.msavisuals.com/ti_3gsm07 could be done in one Nuke project?

[guillem ramisa]

@memo 23423 wrote:

Yea I know flame/smoke would be ideal… but unfortunately they’re a bit above my budget!

Fusion and Nuke seem sooo close (running on an 8core/raid) to what I need that its frustrating not to be able to go that one step further and finish the whole spot in the same app!

All that I really need extra (or what I havent figured out how to do yet) is to be able select a bunch of nodes and group them (analogous to a nested Combustion composition), then give that group a start time – is something like that possible? Or is there any other way a 30 second video like http://www.msavisuals.com/ti_3gsm07 could be done in one Nuke project?

Fusion and Nuke (and Shake) aren’t really targeted at what you need. They are “one shot” based applications suited for collaborative environments like film compositing. As you’ve found out these applications aren’t very good at handling a full conform. For that you’ll need to go about it the same way as you do already and use something else like final cut or premiere. And let fusion or nuke handle comping of single shots.
I can’t really find another way for you to do this without stepping up to some highend system like FFI or maybe avid. But that is probably out of the question anyways.
You will never be as fast as you can be on flame but on the other hand you won’t have the same costs so you can spend more time per job or hire more people to help finish everything on time. And have more fun too because you won’t be working alone.

Cheers,
K

[guillem ramisa]

@memo 23423 wrote:

Yea I know flame/smoke would be ideal… but unfortunately they’re a bit above my budget!

Fusion and Nuke seem sooo close (running on an 8core/raid) to what I need that its frustrating not to be able to go that one step further and finish the whole spot in the same app!

All that I really need extra (or what I havent figured out how to do yet) is to be able select a bunch of nodes and group them (analogous to a nested Combustion composition), then give that group a start time – is something like that possible? Or is there any other way a 30 second video like http://www.msavisuals.com/ti_3gsm07 could be done in one Nuke project?

Fusion and Nuke (and Shake) aren’t really targeted at what you need. They are “one shot” based applications suited for collaborative environments like film compositing. As you’ve found out these applications aren’t very good at handling a full conform. For that you’ll need to go about it the same way as you already do and use something else like final cut or premiere. And let fusion or nuke handle comping of single shots.
I can’t really find another way for you to do this without stepping up to some highend system like FFI or maybe avid. But that was out of the question anyways.
You will never be as fast as you can be on flame but on the other hand you won’t have the same costs so you can spend more time per job or hire more people to help finish everything on time. And have more fun too because you won’t be working alone.

Cheers,
K

[Michael Dalton]

@memo 23423 wrote:

Yea I know flame/smoke would be ideal… but unfortunately they’re a bit above my budget!

Fusion and Nuke seem sooo close (running on an 8core/raid) to what I need that its frustrating not to be able to go that one step further and finish the whole spot in the same app!

All that I really need extra (or what I havent figured out how to do yet) is to be able select a bunch of nodes and group them (analogous to a nested Combustion composition), then give that group a start time – is something like that possible? Or is there any other way a 30 second video like http://www.msavisuals.com/ti_3gsm07 could be done in one Nuke project?

What you need is there for the most part… Grouping a series of nodes is there via the group command. Offseting them in time is there via the offset node. Splicing a group after another group (think FFI deisktop style splice) and dissolve in or out or cross is done via the append node. So with a little tcl scripting you could easily parse an edl and generate a series of node groups followed by append nodes to populate the timeline in a similar way that you might do in Combustion, but without all the bullshit of working in Combustion. What you also can do is add retime nodes (optical flow) for your timewarp segments which is pretty cool.

I wrote something similar for Shake a while back using dissolve nodes and switches for cuts, and the built in retime for timewarps. Works fine. The only issue your’re going to have – which I quickly ran up against – was that you’re going to need to predefine your working format. I’ve been meaning to add it to Digres as well which I’ll shortly publish somewhere for everyone…

In fact I’ve got this Find for Confom script on FXguide that parses edls and will search for DPX files for corresponding events and add them to your Nuke job. I guess I just need marry that code with a little bit of simple Nuke code for conforming events.

Well… until that happens you should be able to do it manually if you wanted to. The thing is, node based editing can be a really strage place to live. It works but it takes some time to get used to it.

Best,
Chris

[Gregory Hill]

Hi Chris, thanks for the tips. I think its clear in my head now that it is technically possible to do what I want in Nuke.. but sometimes not always feasible. I had originally posted this question with a particular upcoming project in mind (a 60s commercial – which is now in post) – and I ended up going with FCP (only for capture and to sit with the director and do a rough edit / footage selection etc.) + AfterEffects (entire 60s commercial in on project) + Cinema 4D.

I did mess around in Nuke, but there were just too many shots for me to be editing with nodes and numbers (14 shots to be precise – no cuts, all shots blend into each other seamlessly with one camera flying around. and all shots are retimed, mixed in with particles, some 3D geometry, and lots of flat 3d planes with images & animations etc.). I just preferred the simple timeline capabilities of aftereffects – though now I am obviously suffering a bit at the compositing stage due to AFX’s lack of node workflow – but thats a choice I had to make… I might just send individual tricky shots to shake (for simple 2d comping), we’ll see.

With what you say, it seems that for anything upto 3-4 shots, it should be pretty straightforward to do the whole thing as one project in Nuke. For this 60s commercial though, I very quickly gave up on that idea. Out of experience, would you say 14 shots is a bit much for the workflow you mention? I mean sure I need to change the way I think and work a bit, and I would start climbing that learning curve for a 3-4 shot clip… but should I even bother for a 14 second clip or is it just too impractical do you think?

[Michael Dalton]

@memo 23616 wrote:

Hi Chris, thanks for the tips. I think its clear in my head now that it is technically possible to do what I want in Nuke.. but sometimes not always feasible. I had originally posted this question with a particular upcoming project in mind (a 60s commercial – which is now in post) – and I ended up going with FCP (only for capture and to sit with the director and do a rough edit / footage selection etc.) + AfterEffects (entire 60s commercial in on project) + Cinema 4D.

I did mess around in Nuke, but there were just too many shots for me to be editing with nodes and numbers (14 shots to be precise – no cuts, all shots blend into each other seamlessly with one camera flying around. and all shots are retimed, mixed in with particles, some 3D geometry, and lots of flat 3d planes with images & animations etc.). I just preferred the simple timeline capabilities of aftereffects – though now I am obviously suffering a bit at the compositing stage due to AFX’s lack of node workflow – but thats a choice I had to make… I might just send individual tricky shots to shake (for simple 2d comping), we’ll see.

With what you say, it seems that for anything upto 3-4 shots, it should be pretty straightforward to do the whole thing as one project in Nuke. For this 60s commercial though, I very quickly gave up on that idea. Out of experience, would you say 14 shots is a bit much for the workflow you mention? I mean sure I need to change the way I think and work a bit, and I would start climbing that learning curve for a 3-4 shot clip… but should I even bother for a 14 second clip or is it just too impractical do you think?

Well I’m glad to hear things worked out for you with FCP and AE. I think for the most part, that *that* particular workflow can be quite powerful. I’ve just wrapped on a jobs which essentially entailed 4 4 minutes pieces that were in some places 8 layers deep which need comping and roto in 444 HD. I actually took the FCP proect over from the editor and pushed out an XML and automatic ducked it into AE and worked the whole job from there… saved days rather than going the Nuke route or even the Flame route, but then I didn’t really have the same speed of processing or the realtime playback that I would have had in Flame.

What I can say is that yes, for a 14 second clip reconforming the timeline in Nuke can be beneficial. It does very much depend on what kind of job you’re looking at doing and in what resolution. Nuke is blindingly fast compared to both Flame as well as Shake and AE for doing big picture large bit depth work. It’s 3d compositing environment is better than flame’s by a large amount imho so for any job that was looking to go down that route I would see substatial gains in trying to get some sort of simple conforming done there instead… probably not all the shots in a single script, but rather a shot per script with a single master script that linked everything back together and held all of the editorial.

Regardless I think that result’s will vary based on the task at hand and it is always beneficial to pick the correct tool for the correct job.

Best,
Chris

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