Hi, I've just started learning nuke and am primarily doing match grades, rotos and comp. I am just curious if there's anyone out there who grade in nuke, and what are your experiences with it? Is it a good software to grade in, or would you recommend me using another software for grades? The company I work at use nuke, but I might be able to recommend them to start using another software for grading. Cheers!
You're not the first person to wonder about that. I have seen some seriously amazing color work done in Nuke, especially on the recovery of some over-exposed, mis-profiled 5D H.264s that no one thought could be rescued. It took a couple weeks of work, but they did it, and saved the project. That being said, Nuke would probably be tiresome to use for anything other than short-form work, like commericals. You really need some sort of grade management and a way to oversee your workflow for an entire project. Even if you added Hiero, there just isn't an easy way to accomplish that. And considering the two of them together cost almost US$10,000, there are much more efficient tools available for less money. The most affordable options are probably Resolve and Speedgrade, but if you would like a system that includes composting features as well, you can take a look at Assimilate Scratch, Autodesk Smoke, and Avid DS.
Hi! Nuke is a soft that you can do a lot of things and of course color grading too, but i think is not a finishing soft for CG, i only use it for matching color In compositing and for example change The iluminators and that. I really recomend you to try resolve, very easy you will see things you are going to be able to do with that
Thanks for your quick answer, Jason! The company I work at has smoke as well, although it's not used that much. I think I'll have to look in to that. Would be great to be able to work a bit faster. That said...grading within a comp, like I'm doing now, I still have to use nuke. I'll look in to Resolve and Speedgrade as well. Thanks for your tips!
andres, yeah, am match grading in nuke now. The idea is to be able to do more looks later on. I think I'll have to look in to other softwares, such as Resolve, and see how we could fit that in to our pipeline here at work. Thanks!
If staying in Nuke is really important to your workflow, Assimilate has a python script called Scratch2Nuke that allows you to quickly move a comp back and forth between the two.... If you want to give it a try, they have a limited, but non-expiring trial you can test it out with here.... http://www.assimilateinc.com/trial
And on the same note, let's not forget Baselight for Nuke: http://www.filmlight.ltd.uk/products/editions/range_ed/index_ed.php#BaselightNUKE
Nuke certainly has some incredible color tools, but (as stated) I just think it would be incredibly cumbersome. As much as I love nuke, there just isn't a good workflow to be able to grade shot after shot after shot.
One other point of view: Nuke was (and continues to be) designed to provide "layer upon layer" color correction, not "shot to shot". At its heart, it is very biased towards Log-based color correction, especially for Cineon/DPX color spaces. Great tools for Primary work. Not so much for Secondaries, although you can always pull your own key(s) and do whatever. Two SPECTACULAR aspects of Nuke: 1) its color picker/definer not only includes RGB and HSV sliders to give you that style of control, but also TMI, "Temperature/Magenta/Intensity", a 3-axis I've encountered no where else. The "Temp" slider moves your color picker warmer/cooler, the "Magenta" slides along the "Magenta/Green" axis and the "Intensity" is pretty much a Luminance control. Really nice for slightly warming or cooling a shot. 2) Nuke DOES allow you to create a "matching" grade, by using the Color Lookup node, then sample your images. Nice for matching black/midtones/whites. Still, as Jason points out, it is not really appropriate for color correction on anything other than a very short-form project. It is a tool for working on a pine-needle on a branch on a tree in a forest, not for managing the entire forest. Good luck, -Gray (Nuke User #001)
Thank you very much. Gray! I also was impressed and happy about the TMI slider! Very cool. Will definitely try the ColorLookup node. Will mostly be doing match grades and test grades on nuke, but if more grade work appears I might have to talk to some ppl. Thanks again!
One other really nice thing I found out was that the Red import module in Nuke will take the numbers from RedcineX accurately. I was matching back to grades applied in RedcineX, but using Nuke to accurately apply resizing/moving repos from Avid to Red r3d files. That was a real pleasant surprise.
On the contrary, Nuke is almost exclusively a linear to light tool, Its default behaviour is to linearise everything on ingest, Log to Lin, sRGB to Lin, Rec709 to Lin... always to Linear... You have to make some very active decisions to make it do anything else, which is great, the correct behaviour is the default behaviour.. Nuke has extremely powerful colour tools, but absolutely non existent conform and grade management tools... I've done a couple of short jobs in Nuke, cut heavy, but always under 5 minutes. You have to be prepared to do some grunt work to manually (or programmatically) take an EDL or XML and break it into something you can work with in the DAG. Once that's done though there are some interesting things you can do with linking shots together, slaving certain things to other things, stuff that to my eye is more flexible than what can be achieved in say Resolve.. You can also use some pretty powerful contact sheet views to get a birds on view on changes you're making... .... And then the edit changes and it all goes to hell.. (compared to a true grading app this is a bombasticly horrific nightmare) The demo of Hiero shown at NAB this year with Nuke fully integrated on the other hand, now that's a concept with some legs..
I was just about to mention Hiero... I agree! Some seriously hairy legs with balls attached! It looks so awesome and I can't wait to get my hands on it! Uuh... On the nuke/hiero combo, not the hairy legs with balls attached... It should be out within a year, probably sooner but they wont set a date in this pre alpha stage.
Yeah It was an extremely impressive demo. I like to imagine a future where you can expose certain knobs at the top level, and treat a nuke precomp node/group as a passthrough effect in the timeline (rather than nuke script as clip like in the demo). At that point you could roll your own color correction nodes, maybe binding certain knobs to a panel. Perhaps a more configurable set of UI elements rather than the current list of knobs. Then you have a grading system with the depth of a comp app, that can throw processing off to a 1000 proc render farm (that's probably pretty idle because the show is finishing).
I would be lost without Nuke on my system, that said, TMI has existed in DS for years now, even combustion had that in v1 a decade ago... and Cyborg2K.. i see that as a pretty basic tool to get through a first pass quickly... i don't use Resolve, but surly it must have that somewhere? I do agree Heiro/Nuke/Baselight is a potential tool set that i could love, in same thought system as Pablo, Mystika and DS - a great hero box ;-)
Hi... I'm dipping into this thread, party because it's related to a thread on the DS-LIST. It seems to me that the Nuke /Heiro combo has the potential to be the kind of high-end, do everything system that DS used to be seen as. With some extra grade management tools it could be brilliant.
