083 How to ripple edit a roto

- [Instructor] Hi, this is Steve Wright, welcoming you to this week's Nuke Nugget. Ever noticed this little button in the roto menu right here? Well, this is the ripple edit button. A lot of people don't know what it does, so we're going to find out. I've got a little roto on this shirt here, so jumping back to frame one, the problem here is, I've already rotoed my character and I go oops, I really needed to pull a feather out right here, like this.

The problem becomes, I've keyframed everything so when I go to the next keyframe, I have to pull the feather out again, and the next keyframe, pull it out again. Not only is this very time consuming, but I'm really not going to be able to pull out exactly the same every frame, so it's going to be very inaccurate work. So, let's fix that, I'm going to select him, shift E to collapse it, next frame, shift E to collapse it, next frame, shift E, so doing it one frame at a time is not good.

That's what the ripple edit is about. I'm going to be able to pull out the feather on one frame and the ripple edit will ripple that edit throughout the entire clip. So turn ripple edit on, notice we get the big red bounding box to remind you, you're in ripple edit mode because you want to turn it on, do your thing and turn it off immediately. You could quickly ruin your roto if you don't turn it off. Okay, so I'm on frame one, my ripple edit is on, I'm going to push in here and pull it out, alright, not let's watch what happens.

When I jump to the next keyframe and the next, and the next, and the next. So it has rippled that edit down to the length of the entire short. Quickly, turn off ripple edit. All the way to the end. Okay. Now, even though I've edited this guy for the entire length of the shot, I still have the freedom to edit any particular frame I want. So I can grab this guy and do that, the keyframe before and the keyframe after, still retained the original settings.

Now let's say, I would like to collapse that, I'd like to turn that off for the whole length of the shot. So I'll select it, turn on ripple edit and give it the old, shift E command. Turn ripple edit off and now, it's gone for the entire length of the shot. Another thing about the ripple edit, is it ripples both forward and backwards, so here I am on frame 15, ripple edit on. Command or control, pull out my feather point, ripple edit off and it has rippled forward and backward over the entire clip.

So there you have it, how to use the ripple edit feature in Nuke's roto node. Be sure to check in next week, so you don't miss out on my next Nuke Nugget.