Learning Nuke

I haven’t seen this posted clearly anywhere and it is pretty simple. Here’s how to match motion blur. Track a point with a tracker node, pipe that node into the 2d transf pipe of the motion blur 2d node, and then pipe the result into a vector blur node. Connect your source footage to the other pipe on the motion blur 2d node and you ought to see some blur!

 

The tracker finds the motion, the motion blur 2d converts it into u and v ramps, and then the vector blur actually converts it into blurred footage.

If you have a camera track, then you can swap that and the motion blur 3d in to get similar results.

One of the first lessons I ever had with nuke is how unstable it can be. It allows you to bog down your system, it allows you to create things that are orders of magnitude more computationally expensive than you need, and it almost encourages you to run betas and bleeding edge releases that have a fair amount of bugs in them. It’s funny to admit, but that isn’t always a bad thing either! Being able to push it to the limit allows us to push our work further as well. That’s the price we pay for having cutting edge tools. Sometimes instability is a fact of life.

One thing that I absolutely love is a little docklet app for osx called istat menus. It allows me to look at my ram usage (including swap) cpu usage, network transfer, and hard drive free space. All of those can come into play when you have an unstable system.  My most frequent offense is having too many instances of nuke open and filling up the ram with cache files. Eventually that leads to utilizing swap, which is when it starts writing ram to the hard disk in order to make more space. That makes everything very, very slow. With istat I can quickly glance up and see if my machine is slow because I am simply hammering the processor, or if I am bottlenecked by swap. If it’s swap, then the answer is simple: close as many instances as possible to release their cache files. If it’s the processor then it is more complicated, but at least I know where to look.

I hear that the linux version of nuke has a built in tool for diving into which node is using the most resources, but I’ve never worked on linux. I would really love to see that in action.

Hello world!

I want to use my first post to talk about what I hope to achieve with this blog. A little over two years ago I started a blog called you down with fcp all about final cut pro editing. At that time I was starting a new editing position at a new shop and I found it to be a really great way of documenting and sharing the little things that I discovered. It also is a great subtle motivation to dig into the app, and really try to find the best possible way to do things.

Now that I’ve moved on from my editorial position I don’t see any reason to stop learning, or to stop documenting my path. Thinking about the future, I plan on being humbled by comments more than a few times, and I hope that in a few years time I can look back and realize how small my insights seem in hindsight. That will prove I have been growing.

I hope that we both learn something in this process.

_Ross