The Foundry Nuke Studio

Overview

Nuke is the compositing tool the film industry settled on, and the reason is the node graph. A layer stack forces you to think about order of operations as a vertical list. A node graph lets a comp branch, merge, reuse a matte in four places, and be read by someone else six months later. On a shot with two hundred nodes that difference stops being a preference and becomes the only way the work is possible at all.

Studio is the largest of the three configurations. It contains everything in Nuke, everything added in NukeX, and on top of that a conform and timeline environment so that shots can be pulled from an edit, worked on, and sent back without leaving the application. This build has the licensing handled, so there is no license server to point at, no floating seat to check out, and no watermark or render limit on output.

The compositing core

Everything in Nuke is 32 bit float and linear by default, which is why highlights survive being pushed around and why a comp holds up under grading later. Multi channel EXR handling is native, so a render with twenty passes arrives as one file and every pass is addressable in the graph without splitting it first. Deep compositing lets elements be combined by depth samples rather than by matte, which solves holdouts through smoke and hair that a flat matte simply cannot.

The 3D system inside the comp is a full scene: cameras, geometry, lights, projections and a scanline or ray traced renderer. Projection setups for set extension and clean plate work are built here rather than round tripped to a 3D package, which keeps the whole shot in one file.

What NukeX adds

The camera tracker solves a moving camera from the plate and gives you a 3D camera and a point cloud to build against. The lens distortion tools measure and undistort using a grid shot, then redistort at the end so the comp sits back into the original plate correctly.

The planar tracker handles surfaces rather than points, which is what you want for replacing a sign, a screen or a tattoo across a shot. Furnace tools cover the awkward jobs: retiming with motion estimation, wire removal, degraining and regraining, and automatic dust busting. Particles and a deforming mesh system round it out.

The Studio timeline

Studio adds a conform, which is the process of taking an edit decision list from the editorial department and rebuilding that edit against the original camera media. From there you can view the sequence in context, send individual shots to the node graph, and see the comps update in the timeline as they are rendered.

Review tools include annotation, versioning per shot, and side by side comparison of versions. Export presets push out plates, transcodes and reference movies with a consistent naming structure. For a small facility this removes the need for a separate conform and review application entirely.

Rendering and pipeline

Comps render locally or through the frame server, which spreads frames across the cores on the machine and, with a small amount of setup, across other machines on the network. Python scripting reaches every part of the application, which is how facilities build the tooling around it, and gizmos let a comp artist package a working sub graph as a reusable node.

Colour management runs through OCIO, so a facility configuration drops in and the viewer, the reads and the writes all agree about what space they are in. That agreement is most of what separates a comp that matches on the big screen from one that does not.

What you get

• Node based compositing at 32 bit float in linear space
• Native multi channel EXR with per pass addressing
• Deep compositing by depth sample
• Full 3D scene with cameras, geometry, projections and a ray traced renderer
• Camera tracker producing a solved camera and point cloud
• Planar tracker for surface replacement
• Lens distortion analysis, undistort and redistort
• Furnace tools for retiming, wire removal, degrain and dust busting
• Particle system and deforming mesh tools
• Conform from an edit decision list against original media
• Timeline with versioning, annotation and side by side review
• Frame server rendering across cores and networked machines
• Python scripting throughout and gizmo packaging
• OCIO colour management

Inside the archive

• Nuke Studio 17.0v4, offline installer
• Nuke, NukeX and Studio modes in one install
• Furnace tool set
• Default OCIO configurations
• Sample scripts and gizmos
• Readme covering the mode selection at launch

System requirements

Installing it

1. Unpack the archive to a local drive.
2. Disable real time protection before installing.
3. Run setup as administrator and complete the install.
4. Apply the licensing step from the readme. There is no license server to configure afterwards.
5. Launch and pick Studio mode from the startup selector. Nuke and NukeX modes are in the same selector.

Mirrors

Release history

Questions about this release

Comments

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