052 Work faster with NUKE's viewer

- Hi, this is Steve Wright, welcoming you to this week's Nuke Nugget. How to use the productivity features built into Nuke's viewer. In the world of visual effects, speed is life. So the Foundry's built a great many productivity features into Nuke, and that includes Nuke's viewer. Here we'll look at those viewer features that will help you increase productivity and create your shots faster. Now our setup is, we've got this great big 6K red clip here, and a thick denoise node just to give us a processing load.

Now the viewer productivity tools are all clustered right up here, so we're going to take a look at 'em, one at a time. First up, of course, is the proxy mode, which I'm sure you're familiar with. Now the proxy mode settings are in the project settings, so cursor in the node graph type S, and if we scroll down here, the default is the proxy mode is scale, and the proxy scale value is 0.5. For a big 'ol thing like this, maybe you'd like to change your proxy scale to 0.25.

I'll undo that. Now in addition to setting the proxy mode to scale, you have the option of setting it to a format. In which case you then get to pop up the format list, and pick which format you'd like to be as your proxy mode. But, I'll undo that. I put myself back to the default of scale mode and a scale factor of 0.5. Okay, we're done with that. Back to the node graph. The next productivity feature to know about is right here, the full frame processing.

Here's the story. Nuke only processes the scan lines and pixels that are in the viewer, so if I push into this guy here for example, because I'm doing some roto or some close-in paint, and I turn on this grade node, it's going to process just what's in the window, and turn this part red. Now if I zoom out to the whole frame, boom, it has to reprocess all the scan lines that were not seen in the viewer. Now this'll really slow you down if you're doing some roto or paint work, because all the time that you're trying to pan around, looking for the next area to paint, you're waiting for the screen to refresh.

So by turning on full frame processing, when you first go to the frame, it's going to render the whole picture once, and then you can do all the panning you want, at no cost. Let me show ya that. So I've set full frame processing on, turns red. I'll turn off my red node here, and then we will step forward to frame two. Okay, see how slow the processing is? Okay? We're doing the full frame now, it's processing all the scan lines right there.

So I'll do the same gag, I'll push in here, we're doing our business, now I'm set for full frame processing, now when I enable the grade node, it's now recomputing the entire frame. Now it takes a little bit longer, but, when you're done, you can do all the panning you want, without waiting for any updates. Let's turn the full frame processing off, and now let's look at this guy here. Now this is both the, I am busy processing, button as well as an update to force updates.

Now watch this, when I step to the next frame, see that guy turns red, that's telling you that it's busy computing the frame, and you should just go away and leave me alone. Okay, but it does have another function which we will see in just a minute. Now let's take a look at the region of interest, or ROI. I'm going to turn off my red grade node here. And the idea of the region of interest is, it restricts the processing to just within the window that you drew.

Very often, you're really only interested in seeing how, for example, a key is working. How's the edge of the key right around the face? And you do not want to recompute the entire screen just to see that. So, we turn on the region of interest. Now, you can adjust the size of this thing, and you can move it around, we can get it narrow, or tall. But you'll notice that as I'm adjusting it, it's pivoting on this corner up here.

Now if you hold down the Command or Control key, it will now pivot all the scales based on the center point here. Holding down Command or Control, I get a uniform zoom, you can do an x, you could do a y, whatever you want. Okay, I have the ROI centered here, now if I turn on my grade node, it fills in that area with red. But you can pick it up, click, drag, and drop it over here, and when you drop it, it'll process that area. Pick it up, drop over here, and it'll process that area.

And don't forget, whenever you turn it off, it's going to redraw the entire screen. Okay, there's one more way to use the region of interest. Let me disable that. I'll move to another clean frame. Now I'm going to show you the ROI freehand draw mode. From the keyboard, alt W, you'll notice the ROI lit up red. Now I can click and drag an ROI box.

I'll turn on my red grade, and it'll fill in that area. Now if I do alt W again, watch what happens to my rectangle. Alt W, the rectangle disappears. I'm still in ROI mode. And then I can just click and drag over here. Alt W, click and drag over here. And of course, once again, when you turn it off, it's going to update the entire screen. Okay, let's take a look at the pause button here, this little guy.

I'm going to open up this grade node. Now, the behaviour of Nuke is that every time you touch any adjustment, it completely refreshes the entire screen. So if I click here, redraws the screen. If I click here, it redraws the screen. So if you have multiple adjustments to make, this could be quite tedious. So what you do is, you turn on the pause, and now you can make all the changes that you want, and it will not update anything, until you unpause.

And there ya go, it'll redo the whole screen. Now there's another way you can do this. I'll turn pause on, and I'm going to make some changes here, and there, and there. Now I can hit the update button, and it'll redraw, with my current settings, but it's still in pause mode. So I can make some more changes, and then do the update button, okay? And then again, of course, you unpause it, and it's going to redraw the whole screen.

Okay, back to the node graph. Okay, for the next thing, I'm going to disable my grade node, jump to frame one, and clear all the cache. Okay now I want to show you the downrez features here. This is one to one or full res, half res, quarter, eighth, and so on. Of course this is a great big 6K red frame, so these could be very helpful for your productivity. Now let's see the effect of all of this.

I'm in full res, I'm going to turn on full frame processing, and hit the play button, and watch how slow it is, going from frame to frame. K, there's frame 2. Okay, frame 3. Alright, well we'll just stop right there. And here comes frame 4. Okay, I'm going to set this to half res. Now let's see how much different that makes in the update speed.

Play. Okay? There. There. There. Pretty fast, hey? But here is the good news. When you have the downrez set, and you turn on proxy, now the two work together. So this proxy is half res, the downrez is half res, so I'm really working quarter res. You can see how fast that is. I'm going to jump the playhead back to frame one, and here we are with proxy and half res play. Look at that.

Way fast. So your downrez setting and your proxy setting multiply together. Okay now, here's a terribly useful productivity feature. The viewers will remember individual separate settings for the downrez, framing, region of interest, and in and out points. So, let's take viewer one, and I'm going to set the downrez to one to one, proxy off, full off, I'm going to set the framing, as soon as the screen refreshes here, set the framing over here on this hand.

I'm going to set my in and out points, they're at frame one, so I'll set it for frame two and frame nine. So in and out points for viewer one are two and nine. Back to frame two. I'll add an ROI, alt W, draw an ROI around this hand. So I've completed all four of my viewer issues. Downrez, framing, region of interest, and in and out points.

Now let's add another viewer, selecting denoise one, Command or Control I, I get a second viewer. Now in this viewer, let's set one eighth resolution, let's set the framing over here on this screen, let's set our in and out points for like, frame four and six, okay? And then let's set a region of interest, alt W, right here on this screen.

Now if I punch up viewer one, double click, I've got the hand. Viewer two, double click, I've got the screen. And we can even, by typing N on the keyboard, rename these guys hand, and type N, screen. And now I can jump to the hand, jump to the screen. So there you have it. How to use the productivity features of Nuke's viewer to produce your shots faster than ever before. Be sure to check in next week so you don't miss out on my next Nuke nugget.