[Dejan]

If you are buying a Smoke check Fusion and Connect they might be a great combo and also take a deep look at Nuke.

We use Nuke for almost everything relating comp work in here, combustion for simplier comps and retouching and After Effects for motion graphics and title work and we are also Max based on the 3D side of things. Editing is all done in Avid and FCP.

[Dejan]

sonny wrote:

and Nuke?

is really cool? I try to learn Nuke some months ago, but looks not so good yet. Shake and DF, both looks better than Nuke.

There are no paint features, timeline….

Don’t get fooled by it’s interface. Take a deeper look at it and you will realise that what you said it’s not true.

It does have paint (a vector one), per parameter timeline and a bunch of time tools that are great. And unless you’re doing motion graphics you won’t miss a timeline “overview”, believe me.

In the end it all depends on the type of work you’re doing. If it’s film compositing and/or 3D compositing none of the tools available on the market today beats Nuke for several reasons. Float point from start to end that works, awesome OpenEXR support, among many others.

Nuke is a bit like Houdini but in the compositing realm in some aspects, you do have to change the way you think in some ways. And once you do you won’t miss the old the way.

cheers,

[Dejan]

Combustion is great but is slow period. I used to use c* with a BOXX in a similar config (+500mb/sec) and there is no visible speed increase, it’s just a little bit faster to load files from the disk. And when I say little faster I mean something really little.

You can only see a visible speed increase while working at footage level.

We can’t forget that c* has an old core now and that it was never meant to take any advantage from fas disk arrays, in c* it’s all about RAM.

You can try to turn on OpenGL to see if it gets a little faster then that, even tho OpenGL support in c* is far from being that great.

Cheers,

[Dejan]

I think all the native C* plugins are capable of handling different colorspaces, from 8 up to float point. And it will probably prompt an error case it can’t deal with a certain colorspace, either by deactivating the plugin or by putting a red circle in the place of the yellow one to let you know that even tho the operator still active something is happening. Check C* warnings on C* error alert tray right beside the HSV percentage values to get info on errors. If you see a yellow exclamation double click it to be informed.

I hope it helps.

[Dejan]

Case you’re with a nVidia graphics you can try the color correction feature on the drive settings to boost your gamma there if your monitor controls can’t handle more.

Also take a look on your monitor settings and check if you have individual control over RGB gain and bias, you may also boost there without having to use the nVidia controls.

But case your monitor is giving everything it cans and still dark I would start to think on switching the monitor.

Cheers,

[Dejan]

Hi darkhorse,

I’ll drop Frank a mail thanking him for that. I never though about that, well we keep learning new things in Nuke by each new day.

Thanks for sharing.

Cheers,

[Dejan]

That I’m aware of, not at this point. Only by keyframing it by hand.

So far you don’t have access to per vertex animation channel in bezier features (bezier, grid warp, spline warp) in Nuke since it creates a keyframe for the whole shape.

But maybe someone else has a better answer or a workaround for you.

Cheers,

[Dejan]

Try to delete the Browser Cache content by hand at:

C:Documents and SettingsApplication Datacombustion4BrowserCache

Since you already there delete Host.ini and Paint.ini at the root:

C:Documents and SettingsApplication Datacombustion4

Open C* and see if it has worked. Case it didn’t you can try to uninstall both of the versions of c* that you have installed and then do a fresh install of c*4 alone.

Aside that I think your best bet would be to call Autodesk.

I hope it helps man.

Cheers,

[Dejan]

I’m not the best person to answer you this but OpenEXR implementation in Fu5 could be way better from what I saw from it and it was a real mess on the first release of v5. It seems that Fu5.1 will make life of those who use multichannel OpenEXR files a litte easier, but for now I think will have to deal with.

[Dejan]

Really odd problem, never experienced that in that proportion.

Did you tried to flush the thumbnail cache on the c* browser?

If not, while browsing for media in the list mode click “Options…” and then in Flush Cache button and pray that this helps. Even tho I don’t use thumbnail mode most of the times I don’t recall having this kind of problem in that magnitude in c* in a single version since Paint and Effect.

Aside that my suggestion would be to completly unistall your copy and delete all the combustion related data available in “C:Documents and SettingsApplication DataCombustion 4” and see if that solves, case not get in contact with autodesk to expose your problem and see if they can help you.

Good luck man.

[Dejan]

Hi Ricardo,

While that article doesn’t come, check their production blog at

– http://300themovie.warnerbros.com/

Cheers,
diogo

[Dejan]

Well… I do agree that AE is terrible for some stuff but is not as bad as most people think, otherwise ILM wouldn’t use it in production. Some stuff are way easier to solve in AE then in Flame, Nuke, Fusion or Shake.

Besides if there is a forum for Motion I can’t see a reason to not have an AE one. I might be because there are thousands of cool AE foruns all over the web like Creativecow, CGTalk, just to mention a few, that I can understand. But in terms of compositing capabilities it’s far more superior then Motion in my personal opnion 😉

Cheers,

[Dejan]

I’m not aware of anything available. The only option that I can imagine to do this directly is to code something on the Houdini side (or not) to convert your chan to a cws.

Case you can’t code that (like me) you could the try low and end long way, it’s a really terrible idea but could get you off this situation.

Clear you scene except the camera animation in Houdini create some objectes (spheres for instance) with a constant shadder applied to it scattered all over the scene. Render that as a sequence and then do a 3D tracking of it using some match move application that supports cws output and voila, you should get at least a very close movement to your Houdini cam.

But paying a guy to code that for you or changing your compositing app are also options 😉

Check Fusion or Nuke. Nuke with Houdini is a incredible mix.

I hope it helps

cheers,

[Dejan]

Hi Macool,

You can use the Shuffle to reorder the channels, Shuffle Copy to copy and reorder channels at the same time or Channel Copy to copy channels from one pipe to another or even in the same pipe (just plug the A and B inputs to the same node and voila).

But for what you want to do you don’t need to use neither of them, just select the green channel as a mask on the mask dropdown menu on the desired node. Case you need to tweak this channel you may add a copy channel node and copy the green channel to a new layer and channel so you can tweak it without having your end RGB result altered.

I hope it helps.

Cheers,
Diogo Girondi

[Dejan]

Which Nuke version are you running?

cheers,

[Author]

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