All language subtitles for nuk309-class01

hi everyone

and welcome to the first class of Nuke 3:09

and I must say

I'm really excited because what we're gonna work on

uh in this course is equal to working on a feature film

uh the quality of the material is high

these are 3K plates

and the shots are challenging

very challenging

and each one of the three shots

has its own little quirks and

problems that will have to solve

so it's not gonna be easy

but it's definitely gonna be interesting

in addition to the three shots that we're

going to work on

you'll get a fourth shot

that's completely for you to work on

and who knows

maybe the best ones will find their way into the film

so in this class

I want to start by

analyzing the three shots and kind of

identifying the problems and what's ahead of us

and then move on to talk about color

procedure and workflow for the effects

the way it is usually in movies

so a lot to do

let's get started

so as you can see

I'm having a hero opened here and we're going to

use the software quite a lot in the course

uh hero basically comes into flavors

there's the big hero

the one that I'm having here

the one that we have at the FX PhD

VPN and there's also Hero Player

which is very similar

only it can't export anything

so you can't use it for ingesting

um material

but you can use it as a wonderful review tool

and that's how I use it all the time

and there are several advantages

because when you review shots for your own

or as a supervisor

uh you wanna be able to um

quickly compare between different versions

you wanna be able to AB between

your latest stake and the plate

for example

and hero does all that

and has some really nice goodies that I'll show you

as we go through the course

for now we simply wanna open um

the three shots and look at them

and one of the advantages of hero then

one of the reasons I really like it is that it caches

really fast

so let's load one of the shots

for example

3:40 and I'll just double click on it

and you can see how quickly it caches

so that shot exist on my SSD drive

which helps of course

but even from a regular drive

it will be pretty fast

and in a matter of like a second or two

you can already

um play as a shot in real time

and again we're talking about

2880 by 1620

so that in itself is great

so now that I'm done with my promotion to

to hero in the Foundry

let's go and look at our first shot

and when I say look at it

I really mean kind of analyze it

and this is important

uh if you're a compositor

it's important

that you look at the shot

and figure out in advance what you'll need to do

instead of just jumping on it uh

without thinking ahead

it's important to plant

if you're a supervisor uh

you definitely wanna look at the shot and assess

how much time and how much effort it will take

and you have to give that information to the producer

who needs to beat on it and give it a price

and it's very easy to make a mistake as a compositor

look at it and say

oh well you know

that's a green screenshot easy

of course it's not

it's actually a very hard shot for many reasons

so let's look at it and

figure out why

so um what we have here is this this girl

the hero of the movie

stepping out into her balcony

and what we're supposed to be seeing is

sort of a panorama of the city because

the balcony is supposed to be

on a high floor uh

now the reason there is a green screen there is because

the balcony is not really on a high floor

and it's kind of blocked by other houses

so the first

issue you can see quite immediately

is the tracking

this is a very

very hard track

the camera does an almost one 80 degree turn

well why almost

it does the one 80 degree turn

um but because we have no depth in the shot

everything is blocked by the green screen

there is hardly any parallax and um

the tracking is

one thing we're not gonna do in this course

because it is so hard um

you're more than welcome to try and do it on your own

but we will provide you with the track

so um now that we know that we'll have a track

it's a bit reassuring

let's look at the other problems

so yellow um

tracking markers on a green screen

it's easy to remove them

when they're far from her

but once they go into her hair

as you can see here

we need to go and paint them out

one by one now

I'll show you

the technique to do that later on in the course

but that's one difficulty we have

green screen is very uneven

there is lots of folds

there is lots of

shadowing um

we'll see how we can deal with that

but that of course

it doesn't make the shot easier

now we have all these stands um

they're standing on the floor

they're over the green screen

they're getting in her hair

um looking at that

we have to find a way to get rid of all these

especially when they go into her hair

get rid of them over the green screen

but also clean

plate them on the ground

and when you see so many of them on the floor

um one thing you might

come to conclusion is that

instead of just clean

plating each

piece of these from the floor

it might be easier to just replace the entire floor

and this is probably what we're gonna do oh

if you tracking markers here

um spill is that spill

um that's going on here

everything is green what is it

is that spill

I mean the first Assumption is that it's spill

but this is when you really wanna look at some

photography from the location to figure out

what their original

colours are

because when you have such a big

giant screen

kind of choking everything uh

you can assume that everything will have a lot of spill

so luckily we have some photos

and I brought a few here

off the original location

so here is how the balcony looks

without the green screen

it's actually pretty nice

but it's not serving the purpose of the movie

um we have um

buildings blocking everything

and also we wanna make the balcony look a bit more

um modern um

rich people's

penthouse style

not this kind of

concrete um

but one thing we can see is that we have those shades

and those shades are actually greenish

so when we go back to our shot

uh we have to be careful

uh not to just

automatically

dispel everything

now let's talk about

environment

we just looked at

all the problems of

tracking and

marker removal

rig removal

and so forth um

we have nothing here

besides the floor

so we're supposed

to probably

we need to extend the floor

uh build um

the railing

or whatever is there

at the edge

of the balcony

and then of course

put a background in there

and that background

should serve us

for a big big

camera move

so it's not a simple

you know one played background

we need to either

use a panoramic stitch

or create something similar

that will serve us so

um oh and here

that shadow

under the green screen is never

very helpful

so basically

this is a tough shot

and we'll spend

a few classes just working on it

now we're not gonna start with

each shot though

we're gonna start with another one

so let's look

at this one um

and let's just

let it play

okay so let's talk about simple things

what's easy

no problem tracking here

it's a simple to detrack

um they hardly move the girls

uh much easier to create a background environment

for this one

it can almost be

a steel photo because there is no dolly in

dolly out there is no perspective shift

so that's the easy part

the hard part is extraction

I mean you again

might make the wrong Assumption looking at it

that it's an easy shot yeah

just you know

pull the key

put the background and it's done

the problem with shots like this is uh

detail and we're talking mainly about hair

and about the fact that there is um

a very shallow depth of field and there is a rack focus

so we're focused on this girl

at the beginning of the shot

the other one is completely out of focus

and now we rack focus

and suddenly this one is out of focus

this is in focus

everything that has to do with very soft edge and

edges and very fuzzy edges like hair um

edges that are out of focus

edges that are motion blurred

which we don't really have here

because there is no fast motion

are gonna be hard

and we wanna

and because these

these girls are basically feeling the screen

it's a two shot

we wanna make it look nice

so we're gonna start the course actually with this shot

because it's a

we can call it a nice warm up

for the harder ones

and will devote at least a class on just

extraction techniques

if any one of you has taken my previous new course

the a Nuke 2:17

we had a class about this

this is gonna be

sort of like a continuation of that class

um so that's the second shot

and the third one

a very interesting one

so again we can play it and

immediately figure out that there is no

big tracking issue

there is no big camera move

what the director wants in this shot is to have

um sort of a

passenger plane

or a plane that crashed right over there

so it's a crash site

when she's walking

right in front of it um

so this is a mat painting shot

we have to create

something that totally doesn't exist there

and we're gonna work

uh with the mat painter here

with my colleague

Matthew Connor

who also uh

helped out and

talked on my previous new course

the new 2:17

but besides the matte painting

it's gonna be a very hard

shot to integrate stuff into

as you can see

the lighting

is very very uh

how would I say cruel

haha very restricting

uh the shot

is very strongly backlet

uh right there from the sun

the colours are very subdued

almost desaturated

so it's hard to bring in detail

make it look good

and make it fitting

there of course

we have this giant flare going on top of everything

which will of course

have to recreate or extend

over the top of other things

so this shot can be um

a good challenge

for integrating matte painting elements

and creating a finished comp that feels

coherent okay

so let's not talk about a typical visual

effects input

output workflow

and what it means in terms of color work

so we start by everything being shot by the camera

and once a day

shoot is over

dailies are created

now in the old

old days of film

old days in the days of film

that meant scanning the film through

teleseen or something similar

fast scan and creating video files uh

today when almost everything is shot digitally

it basically means taking the raw

uh footage and converting it into small

uh low quality

manageable quick times

now the important thing is that usually when the guy

does the stuff

he also color grades

um the quick times

because the raw material

of course uh

is not very nice to look at

it's probably to desaturate

it doesn't have

enough contrast

so the dailies guy

looks at the shots

and grades them

either by shot

by shot bases or

by sequences

and at the same time of course

the raw material is

taken out and sent to the lab

now I wrote DPX here because this is the most

common file format in

the film industry

and this is basically because that's

always been used

for scanning film

nowadays again

when everything is digital

we're almost everything

thiefs and exors

can do even better

but most labs

are still kind of

built around the PXs

so that's why it's still

the most common

file type alright

so now we move to editorial

and the director and

the editor are

cutting the film

and they're actually

using the um

quick times from dailies

um because it's faster and easier

and also because they're already color graded

so things look

better for them

in the meantime

the raw material just sits there in the lab

now a rough

cut has been made

and editorial is

starting to send stuff

for visual effects

so they start by sending

quick times from their cut

for those shots that need to

uh have visual effects

and these are of course

not to be worked on

we don't do the visual

effects on quick times

but they're

important because

they're used as reference

and they're used for visual

by visual effects to

assess the amount of work on shots

and create beads

and so forth

once that is done

a tutorial is basically ordering from the lab

um the relevant frames to be sent to

the visual effects

so now we have high resolution frames

and we have

the quick times

and of course

there is a big difference because

the high resolution frames

are raw and

the quick times are graded

so here's the thing now

um we have to give editorial

quick times

with our visual effects

but the quick times have to look exactly like

the stuff they already have there

if we send them something that has a different color

it's gonna look weird to them

and it will cause problems

the thing is that we um

don't have that color

because we've been working on the

raw footage

so we have to um

match by eye

a color that

was applied a long time ago

to a quick times

and that's of course

not always easy

now on some movies

especially ones that have

lots of visual effects

and usually also are

set up technically

um for visual effects

this will be sold

by having a

one unified lot

or look up table

that will be

applied to all

the footage

and editorial

will be working with that lot

and visual effects will be working with it

that makes things very easy

unfortunately

this is almost never

the case in um

most movies

and that's where

you have to go into um

grading your

work to match a tutorial

and this is what we're gonna look at

now in nuke

so let's open

nuke and uh

we wanna look at

the shot that we're

we'll start working on in

the next class s H

3:40 and first

let's bring in

the editorial reference

so that would be in

the riff folder

and we want the graded quick time

the one that has the grade

and as you can see

um this is of course HD and it's Avid D& X

now this codec is usually used

um when exporting or importing to the avid

so in the film industry

it's pretty much the standard for quick times

now rvdn XHD comes in different levels of quality

uh the 36 which is this quick time is the lowest one

so it's fast and quick

but the quality is not very good

um we're gonna use the AVDNX36 here in this course

for posting uh your shots for review because it's small

and quick to download

at a certain point where you wanna show

higher quality work you wanna

you might wanna jump into 1:15

which is a higher quality setup

larger files

so now let's bring in the uh

the original plate for this shot

and this is of course the 3K

raw footage

and the first thing we see when we

AB between them is that they don't match

and the reason is that usually

what you get from editorial is

the exact length in the cut

but what you get from the lab

in terms of high resolution frames

you usually get handles

usually eight frames at the beginning and the end

or head and tail

um in this case

in our case

we actually have 12 frames

head and tail

um so you wanna

move it 12 frames

uh backwards to match to the quick time

but if you also look at the shot

you see that it's actually starting at frame 1000

where is our quick time starts

at frame one

so if we go back to the plate

let's change frame to start at and put it at frame 1

now it's gonna start at frame 1

now we can add a temporary time offset

and put it back to minus 12

and now if we AB between them

they should match in terms of the frame

now you see that in this specific case

the colored Quick time is not too far from the original

so you can just go ahead and

put a grade node

and very easily kind of match this color

so it has more contrast a little bit brighter

so you wanna probably turn down the gamma

turn up the gain

probably more gain

it also feels a tiny bit more blue so you wanna

maybe add a little bit more blue

you can look at the yellow colors

maybe we went a bit too far in the gamma

now this is all fine and dandy when you have a

a very easy grade like this but things can

very easily become very complicated

and you have a hard time matching the grades

and this is where an a really useful um

new tool in UK comes in

the match grade so let's now take a look at that

so let's delete our own grade and let's bring in the um

match grade node

and you wanna connect your source

to your to what you wanna grade and the target

to the uh graded element

now one thing you really really have to remember

uh both source and target have to match exactly

and if you look at our resolution

when you AB doesn't look different

but actually here we have 2880

and here we're talking HD

so if you try to use the match grade

without reformating um

your your source material it's gonna go all crazy

because the pixels need to be

exactly on top of each other so

all you need to do is add a reformat node here

and set it to HD so it matches the uh the quick time

now you can also see that there is

a big difference between the quality

even reformatted between the quality of the raw frames

and the quick time

it's not just the colour

it's just that

look at the hair

I mean we lost all of it

but the match grade will look through it

and will still do a good job

so basically

if we look at our target

and we double click on the match grade

we have to give it a few key frames to check

and depending on the footage

sometimes uh

one key frame is enough

uh sometimes you need more

if there's more color changes going on through

uh in this case

you know one might be enough

but we'll just give it

um 3 keyframe

so we go somewhere that we wanna grab

we add a keyframe

let's go another area

and another keyframe

and let's add a third one towards the end

and now we can let

the match grade just do its work

so analyze reference frames

it's gonna look at these frames

match the grade

and now if we look through it and we

compare to the quick time

and I'm a being now

the only difference I'm seeing

if I'll zoom in is the difference in quality

but the grades are spot on

so now you might say here

my life is so much easier

I have this wonderful tool

it is a wonderful tool

but like all automated

tools it has pit falls

and I wanna show you

a a good example of when

you don't want to use the match grade

so what I have here is a plate of

one of the shots we're gonna work on

and I took this plate and created a grade

and this time it's not even a quick time

it's stealing the XR

the same format

now when you compare between the non graded plate

and the graded plate

you can see that there are some things

that look a bit weird over here

and this is based on my experience

a lot of Times

Daily's grades are done on

8 bit quick times

and the extreme ranges

especially the highlights get crushed

in um in all kinds of weird ways

and this is actually typical of a grade

you might need to match to

and um first

let's see what happens when we uh

use the match grade node

so let's bring it on

and connect it

and let's do the usual thing select uh three key frames

and

let it do the analyzing

okay so here's the result

and if we compare it to the graded plate

it's wonderful

excellent it's almost 100% identical

slight differences

so match grade is doing a terrific job

I think it's doing probably a better

job than most of us can do by

eyeballing and grading manually

so all this is great

but here is uh what happens if you start working

on your comp

so to give you an example

I'll add a grade note here

say you're working on your comp now

and of course this is before it gets that final grade

um and let's say in your comp

you're doing some color changes

and you pull a little bit of the green out

so let's do that

and start pulling a little bit of the green out

just a little bit

alright so look what's happening right there

around the sun

something very bad is happening

and if we look at um

the grade without the match grade

it looks good

so that's uh

with pulling the greens down

that's without everything is well

so it's pretty obvious that whatever is happening is

caused by the match rate

and basically um

the reason it doesn't work like this is

the way I created this grade was kind of simulate how

grades are applied to 8 beat

footage or 8 beat quick times

all the clamping that

happens and the crushing of the highlights

now Match Grade is an automated tool

so he doesn't think that way

doesn't think oh well

but maybe I shouldn't crash the highlight so much

even though it's like it's great

it's just doing what it's supposed to do

and trying its best to match

but this is causing problems

because it's pulling and pushing the colours in a way

that make it really hard to work on the comp without

having all kinds of issues

so in a case like this

you definitely wanna go and create your own

manual grade by eyeballing

and I have one here

and you can see that it's not as

similar to the

reference as the match grade did

but the good thing about this grade

is that it doesn't hurt the highlights in the same way

because I use the clamp to kind of pull down

the sky the way was in the grade

and if I copy that little green pulling

and put it here and we compare the results

so here we have these horrible artifacts happening

and here it's working fine

so then again

a match grade is a is a wonderful tool

but be careful when you use it

be careful what you match to

because sometimes it can cause problems

so now let's go back to our first match grade

so in case you do wanna use the match grade

like in this case

which is gonna work just fine

what you want to do is export

a lot file from the match grade so that you can use

to grade your quick times

and for that you go into the match grade

you go all the way down

it will save a CSP file so you save it as CSP

you're right I'm overriding what I already had there

and then when you need to use that grade in your comp

all you need to do is create a vector field node

um so you can read this lot file and just load it

and this is it

so now you have a lot

that's without

that's with

so now that we have a lot file grade

let's go and take a look at the

basic setup for this creep

so you start of course by bringing the plate

and I know there's always a confusion about

in what color space to bring in the plate

and what color space to look at well

EXRs are usually linear

so much as DPX's are usually logorithmic

it's not always the case

doesn't have to be like that

but there is a very simple rule basically

whatever you bring it in

if you render it out the same way

it will be exactly the same

so if you're worried about sending back to the lab

something that will look different than what they gave

you as long as you keep that rule

everything will work

so if you bring the XR as linear

you should just render it out as linear

whatever you choose

here is a viewing that doesn't really matter

if you decide to bring it in as srgb

just remember to render it as srgb

it will still look the same

and whoever is gonna use this in the di

is gonna load it whichever way they want

so there really isn't a big problem here

on the other hand

when you render your quick times

you wanna render

what you are actually seeing on the screen

in that case

you wanna set them to the color space you're viewing

which in these cases srgb

so we brought in the plate

of course we wanna make it start at frame one

and not frame 1 thousand

so let's change this

and we also want to set our globals

first of all to have the right train

so the shorties 120 frames

let's set our range to 1 to 1:20

and the other thing you wanna do of course

and that's very important

is to set your resolution to the correct one

and that will usually be

the last one that appears there

here is our 2880 by 1620

so this is all set

and now you're gonna do your comp

let's just put a node here and call it comp

and at the end of the comp

you basically want to write two different outputs

one will be the raw output that goes to the eye

and one will be for the quick time

so for the row I'll put just as we said

you want to write back exactly the way you brought it

right EXRS and set your color space to linear

that's as simple as that

for your quick time

you want to add your color grade

so we'll open a Victor Field node

and we'll bring in that lot that we created

she is right here

as we fill out

and of course

we want to reform at the usually will be HD

so let's um reform at this to HD

right here

and for the settings in the right node

so you wanna write an MOV

so for this case let's just go to our shot to

renders cutie and you see I have a separate folder

just for the quick times and let's give you the name

some name just for now

movie and as you set it to mov dot MOV

it's gonna give you all the options

so first as I said

you wanna set your color space

to the one you're viewing

otherwise if it said

for example to the default Gamma 2.2

your Quick Time will come out with a different color

and that's a case for big confusion

so make sure you always match the way you viewed it

if you want

the editor or the director to see what you're seeing

on the Quick Time

and then you wanna set your codec

and as I mentioned before

we wanna work in Avid DNX HD because that's

the most common codec

um for for the avid

so let's set it to this

click on advance

and bring in this

and we probably wanna use 23.98 frames per second

if it goes to an editing suit like the avid

we don't need millions of colors

plus that's for Alfa or other things

they don't need millions of colors

we wanna set it to

RGB levels because we're rendering it as RGB

that's important

if it was Rex 7:09

we would like this

no Alpha and finally

we want to use

the 23.976 DNX AG36 beat

so you see we have one 15 and one 75

these are higher

qualities for now

we use 36 beat

we said all that

that's ready to go

and that's basically it

now what I suggest is that you render out

the first version v 0

1 uh which will be just the plate

and you render it out also as a quick time

using your grade

that will allow you in

uh hero to uh

quickly go back and forth between your next version

which will be already the comp

and the plate

it's also important that you have

a good folder structure for your shot

and that you can keep it consistent between the shots

here is what I suggest

of course you can do any variation on that

as long as you know where your stuff is

um a 2D folder has all the nuke scripts

uh the hero um files

any Photoshop files and so forth um

the 3D will have your myocene files

featurey or whatever you're using

that's a 3D software

in elements

you're gonna put all your matte paintings or renders

um plates of course

will be the plate itself

as you can see here

ref is a good one to put

all kinds of reference material

for example

now we have the two quick times from a tutorial

the non graded and the graded as reference

and finally

the renders folder

or where you put your final renders or new renders

as opposed to the 3D renders which will go in elements

and here we have

um a folder for each new

version that you create for the EXRS

and the Quick Time folders that have all these versions

of the quick times that correspond to the um the XRS

and as you can see

I named them v zero one

v zero two and not t for take

uh that simply because hero

will automatically look at anything named V

number and trade it as a new version

so this is it for this class

and in the next class we're going to work on the shot s

H 3:40 and you got a few JPGs and one of them

should be the background for the shot

so take a look at it

and feel free to start working on the shot

and I'll see you all next week bye bye