Discussed file formats and their relevance in Nuke, with EXR being the most prevalent file formats to use in Nuke, that being mp4’s or EXR’s and the software used in compositing, with After Effects and Nuke being the main programs while also having davinci resolve fusion as an option.
We also talked about the digital production pipeline and the main lines of pre production, production and post production and a short overview of the roles done inbetween.
I’ve previously used Nuke before so relearning most of the controls were a bit of a refresher course for me, but after around a year of last use it was definitely a much needed refresher.
Starting off with the refresher was simply just hitting Tab and importing a file through the Read node, and toggling the viewer to see the footage using the 1 Key.
Afterwards was using both the gain and Gamma sliders to effect the video in the top right. I’d actually not properly used these before as i’d never really had a reason too or would usually add a different node to do so, but having these around is nice and may save time from crating and plugging in new nodes.
Next was testing out and applying some blur nodes and keyframing them to create a Gaussian blur into frame. I’ve previously done this in after effects a lot of times, but a lot of my experience in Nuke came from Tracking using CaraVR, 3D Integration using merge nodes and 360 Stitching, so something as simple as doing a blur node felt fresh to me again.
Next i was taught about just rearranging the panels in Nuke to fit your layout. I’ve had many times in Nuke prior of accidentally messing up the layout and removing a pane that i shouldn’t have, so being able to finally edit this is one of the greatest strengths i could probably learn. Layout and knowing your interface can truly make a difference between working both quickly and efficiently.
Next was creating a simple composition using the merge tool and some grading / transform nodes. Back when i previously had worked in flame, i’d had it really drilled into my head to keep my node graphs very meticulously organized, which is something i want to keep doing going forward using Nuke.
After this it was just a simple thing of using the write node again and exporting this composition to a jpeg after fixing up the composition a little more.
And our little test composition was now finshed!
With this proof of concept i decided i wanted to test out the color grading skills of Nuke. I Personally use Davinci Resolve for all of my Compositions and have some footage that i previously color graded in Davinci, though it was graded incorrectly on a monitor that had very low contrast. I no longer have the raw footage, but to get a little refresher on both Nuke and Davinci, i decided to import different shots and see how it fared on color correcting compared to eachother.
First of all, these videos are both way too large and also as MOV, which are probably not going to play well in Nuke, With some of these videos clocking in at nearly half a gig, these definitely need to be compressed down.
These were converted to an H.264 Codec and the resolution was halved, with the bitrate being dropped to just around half of what it originally was. Now that the file size and codec has changed these should play well in Nuke and Davinci.
While attempting to find the Histogram in Nuke to start compositing i wanted to use the color correct node but accidentally put in a deep color correct node. I hadn’t seen this before and looked on the foundry website here: DeepColorCorrect (foundry.com) to attempt to find the difference. It seems as if deep color correct is mainly used for getting a matte, so for this time i’ll stick with using a regular color correct node.
I found a way on the foundry site to use histogram both as a panel to view in real time, and a node to use. Though the node doesn’t seem to have too much use when editing the way i’m doing as it doesn’t update in real time and only updates after switching to the node after every edit with the color correct node.
Originally the video had a lot of issues with the highlights being very oversaturated and the reds being blasted to the point where the video looked very yellow and green tinted in some places. I fixed these by using 3 different nodes, being the hue correct to bring out more of the reds, a color correct node to tone down the highlights and up the shadows, and a grade node as a master correction node to adjust gain and lift if needed.
This was the difference between the videos, the first one being the color corrected: and the second being the original version.
Next was to use the same clip in Davinci and see if i could get the same result or better. I used initial primaries adjusting the Lift, Gamma Gain and Offset, then a secondary to try and bring back some of the red tones while toning down the yellow tones. This originally didn’t work as well and i had to almost brute force remove some of the color using the qualifier tool, with some more refining i feel like i could have gotten it a bit more red, but it started to look close enough to what i was going for.
The end result was a little bit red blasted in some of the highlights but overall achieved the comparison i was going for.
At the end of the day these are two very separate programs. However i learned a lot more about Nuke and it’s ways of color correcting from this small process. In terms of which is better for color correction, i think Davinci still ends up coming out on top when it comes to specifically making very detailed corrections with its easy qualifier tools, access to many LUTS and power windows. While i feel Nuke being mainly used for compositing can still provide some very quick and easy color correction.