8 Observations

Nuke 8 has been out for sometime here are some observations.

The camera tracker can now scale your scene based on real world measurements. No more objects that are -456.890 in scale. The stills solver works if you take your photos with the number 3 in mind. Nuke needs 3 points to calculate x,y,z axis, make sure the images you give it reflect that. The editGeo will prove to be a time saver. Model builder is getting better, far from perfect but like all good features making forward progress. Watch out for co-planar faces and vertices. Both the camera tracker and model builder has made progress in both how they work and how to make them work. That is very important.

Match grade is some what of a disappointment. The workflow for me and for most vendors the QuickTime you deliver to the client must match the dailies the editor and director have been staring at for months. Match grade failed pretty bad. I wouldn't go as far as writing it off but as for making dailies for editorial didn't get easier or faster. Whatever the mojo is I haven't found it.

Paint seems fine and the full frame rendering is amazing. Having your playback not break when you zoom in is a game changer. Your supers are going to love it.

The new color controls are cool but small. Option+command will bring up the old pop up window(it's hard to argue with 1993).

The new QuickTime settings in the writes and reads seem to help the age long color space problems with QuickTime movies. This is nice.

Nothing seems to be broken or acting differently. Only the new nodes and features seem to have bugs. Which brings me to the new submit your cash report dialog. We might get a better Nuke because of it. I almost never sent that info to the The Foundry. Shame on me.

I have been pushing Nuke 8 pretty far, 2d compositing, paint and 3d are in my mind very strong. A good release.

8

Last week The Foundry released a new version of Nuke. In the past Nuke has always enjoyed a wonderful update cycle, with what Russell Dodgson calls RotoPaint bounces [agreed some of the bugs in the RotoPaint node so bad it's kinda embarrassing for The Foundry] the updates have always been really good. This time is no different. Nuke 8 has new tools and make overs to older ones. Everyone seems to be talking about the new match grade and the new text tool.

Match Grade used to be a tool kinda like the furnace plug ins, they sometimes work[in ideal situations only]. The new tool seems to work pretty good and will be helpful to have LUTs being made for your inputProcess. Clients are used to seeing their movie look how they have been seeing it all thru out post. Match grade is working pretty well for me. This will make QuickTimes easier to make for clients.

There are two features that might be overlooked.

The first of these I think shows how The Foundry feels about the GPU. The GPU acceleration used to only be in NukeX. Now full GPU acceleration is in Nuke. The second of these features is the Blinkscript node. Which makes it easy for TDs [or any Nuke artist with C++ programming skills] to make custom nodes that run on the GPU. You can setup complex nodes that render really fast on your supported GPU.

The full frame processing in the viewer is so good. So many times the supervisor says zoom in on that as he works over your shoulder, you zoom in only to have to wait for Nuke to redraw that part of the frame. Enable this feature and fear no more. It's simple but nice.

The camera tracker in Nuke 8 has been reworked and their is some new stuff in their that seems really cool. I have been playing around with the Stills Solver and it works really well. The interface to the node has changed so have a look here.

Help has been completely redone. It's really good. It was a little strange having Nuke drop you into your browser but the help is great. Movies and step by steps if you are using the tool for the first time.

You can grab a copy to play with for 15 days for free from The Foundry. You can also see a great presentation from the Nuke8 event in London.

I'm off to see what broke in RotoPaint.

Double

Studios are wanting more for their money than ever before. They want free money even. Visual effects are no stranger to this. Because of this lots of people ask why visual effects cost so much? I'll tell you why.

You crew up again.

Let me explain. After pre-production and production the images have been captured and all seems done. Champagne and wrap parties. Not so fast. The movie making process is just getting started. In some cases there are whole worlds to create. This reminds me something Glen Campbell said in a visual effects cinematography class I took while at UCLA. He talked about TRON, and how Disney Execs were shitting there pants when they saw a rough cut of film. This rough cut was before all the roto was done and all the neat effects added to the film. They were looking at actors against black felt. It was just the edit.

This was a change in the way movies where made. Before everything was captured in the camera. You did some editing and sound design, added a sound track. Most if not all was done "On the day. " not weeks months down line.

Now here is the most important part of this. Those Disney execs they are not stupid for not know what was happening. They just didn't know. Your not stupid if you have never been taught fractions and you think 1/6 is bigger than 1/5. You just don't have the right information.

Producers and directors not having the right information is our fault not theirs.

Important

I heard a story about DD one time about how a producer pulled aside the Roto/Paint Lead and told him "On this show roto and paint will be very important."

The Roto Paint lead responded " Everything is going to be important, we are all important."

Why am I sharing this with you? Because that type of thinking is hurting visual effects as a whole. Everyone is important.

Put together a team, do not just fill seats. Plus if you really want your "A" team all the time as a producer you need to make sure they don't leave. Keep them busy, keep them happy. Don't micro manage them. Let them do what they do well. Making a film is hard, no doubt. Don't make it harder by hiring the guy off the street. The story starts with a single image. Talented people put there minds to work on what that world should look like guided by a director that hopfully has a vision, and can articulate it to others.

Assemble your team carefully. Choose the roto artists because they do great roto not because they are cheap but because you know their is going to be a shit load of roto to be done. Find really good texture artists if you need to be inches from cg with your camera. Get the right lighting people in. Set upon the crew based on talent not price.

Visual Imaging

"Life of Pi" and "Hugo" both had a huge amount of pixels that where not captured in camera. Both DOPs won an Oscar for their work. If more and more of your images are being composited together to make one cohesive image all those artists that brought that image together should be awarded as well.

The traditional director of photography model is broken. Almost all if not all of the images you see on the screen have been manipulated after being captured in camera. Gone are the days of testing and developing a look for a film. Sometimes months before production started the DOP would start testing film stocks and lens with the main actors and actresses. This would make sure that the look that the director wanted could be achieved and that all the lenses would make the face you just paid 20 million for looks as good as it can. After the image was captured there was very little that could be done to fix it. They had to have it right.

Enter Cineon and scanning of film. Things could be fixed well after the image was shot. At first small things. Then the whole look of a film was developed after the fact and digital intermediate became the norm. As digital techniques got better we could do more and more. George Lucas is famous for cutting a actor out of one take and placing him into a completely new one. I will even say these are not split screens, this required lots of artists not in the camera department to achieve.

So if a DOPs job is to light a blue screen and get the key light on the right side of the subject does he/she deserve a credit for images the matte painter makes, or the lighting on the cg tiger, or train station? If you as a DOP only contributed 1/25 of the pixels on the screen then no, I think they do not.

Historically to win a best picure oscar you as a producer had to be able to connect all the department together to make one cohesive world that the audience accepted as real. The tools to do that have changed. The academy needs to start understanding what and how the new tools work and how they add to the film making process.

Right now that cohesive world we want is built in a computer not a camera.

What can we do to change this? It's complicated and involves changing a process is decades old. Answer this question and I bet the visual effects/movie making process as we know it also changes for the better. I am in no way saying that the DOP is not needed or there job is easy. In fact it's is an incredibly hard job, in fact without a DOP to capture the first images and set a tone. Going to a location and shooting a scene that might not even take place at this time or place is a challenge. It's just that increasingly more of the images comes from other sources than just in the camera.

I am not sure if adding a extra category will help but I would love to be proven wrong.

My two cents on Portfolio Reviews →

Pascal Campion: 

1. If you are images tell a story, you are more than halfway there.

2. if your story is crystal clear, you are ninety nine percent of the way there.

3. if your stories are clear and personal, you just broke the house.

You’ll notice that neither in 1 or 2 is there any mention of technique… and, oddly enough, there is still no mention of it in number 3 either. You know why? BECAUSE IT DOESN’T MATTER!!!

Let me make this clear. When you are showing your portfolios to people, you are selling ideas and personalities. Not how you handle Photoshop, or perspective. Not how you mix your colors, or how many different variations on a tree you can create. These are exercises you do in school to develop your skills that are used to create stories..which is what I look for.

Nailed it.

I have heard that artsts that come out of places like India or China have work that looks and feels similar. It is not a good sign that artists in the USA are having the same problem. Most of my job is problem solving. Only after I have thought about the problem and solved it can I push the right buttons.

I cannot blame the schools thou, most employers that are looking for insert application here want to make sure you know where the buttons are and when to use them. They are not looking for problem solvers. As a side effect they get non-starters that just give up when they run out of buttons to push. This kind of artisty also drives down rates as the thought is we are not knowledge workers anymore, we are just button pushers.

That is bad for all of us, incuding the owners of comapnies that make great art.

Saving

Recently the company I work for decided to take the month of July off. Which for me is awesome. It can only be awesome if I am prepared for it.

Being prepared for time off makes it so great. No stress. No worrying about where the next job will come from. The idea of time off is to spend time doing all the things that you don't get to do while working. Some if not all will cost money. Don't go into time off thinking you'll just not spend money. That type of thinking will drive you nuts. Even if you are single. You need money. You need food, gas, you need to have fun. If you have a family the money has to be there. You have no choice. You need money for activities. You need money for school stuff. You always need money for extras. Maybe your child needs speech work or that swim or gym class.

I have to say this was not something I was thinking about when I first started. This is something I learned from the senior artists. This is something I needed to learn. Most have a hard time saving money. But if you don't your time off will be horrible and more stressful than when your working. Figure out what you need to live for a week, then save, save, save.

I hope everyone is having a great summer.

Nukepedia is Back →

I'd like to welcome back Nukepedia to the web. It's one of those services that you have no idea how much you use it til it's not there.

If you have a an idea or need some base ideas, what a resource.

Thanks Frank.

RotoPaint Problems

One the main things items that are searched on this blog is RotoPaint problems.

In Nuke 6.3 the RotoPaint is painfully slow.

Here are 3 tips that will make Paint work much, much better.

• Paint on 1 frame then frame hold that frame. Setting it this way Nuke has to only render one frame of paint instead of all.

• Limit the amount of brush strokes to 100. When you get to one hundred start a new RotoPaint node. This will also keep you from losing less if a paint node goes belly up.

• Place a shuffle before your RotoPaint node And set the alpha to 1[White]. This will help make he onion skinning work.

Remember the RotoPaint node is very very temperamental. Stay calm.

I'd like to be clear. I did not figure any of this out. These were told to me by other compositors.

Doing Better

While doing nothing does nothing, doing the wrong thing doesn't help either. This isn't rocket science. My question, and I can't find anything on this.

How long did it take the directors, writers, actors, set lighting, grips to form a union?

Weeks? Months? Years?

Are we slow, are we that disconnected with what is wrong? I don't think we are.

Lets be clear. If you want overtime and health care we are going to have to unionize. This is especially true if you work in a small shop. I do not see smaller shops offering health care and pension plans, even huge places won't. The way it's setup doesn't work. This is true in the USA. If you happen to work in a location that offers government provided health care this not a concern but retirement should be.

Here's the problem if you have been a freelancer the whole time in visual effects you should know to save money. You should know you are going to pay "X" amount of money for health care. Not having a retirement plan at 40 isn't anyone's fault but yours.

So file your rep card. Talk with the artist next to you. Lets see if we can do better.

I love visual effects. I love the problem solving and the people. Lets make it better so we can continue to do what we love.