All language subtitles for 5. Navigating Inside the Node Graph

Now let's take a look at how we navigate inside of the Node Graph.

I've gone ahead and added a couple of extra nodes to the

comp just to make the comp a little bigger,

in real life, you'll get into comps that are much,

much larger, and much, much more complicated than this,

but for the time-being,

I just wanted to add enough nodes to the comp to give us an idea of the

different functions of NUKE that allow us to pan and zoom.

As I've mentioned in earlier modules,

you can click the middle-mouse button and just drag along

to pan the comp wherever you need to go,

and you'll notice that as soon as the comp goes off screen,

we get this little box in the lower-right hand corner,

and this box has two components: it's got a white border and

it's got a pink box inside that white border.

You can drag this box to make it bigger and easier to see,

and this pink box you can also drag,

and that allows you to pan inside of your comp.

We're actually moving the entire screen,

and then once we have the entire comp in view,

which is very rare in production, but in this case,

if we have the entire comp in view,

the box will disappear because we see everything that we need to be seeing.

If you have a mouse that has a scroll button on it,

you can use that scroll button to zoom in or to zoom out of your comp.

Once we're zoomed in,

you'll see that since there is some comp that we have off screen,

this box appears again,

and we can just pan and zoom the way that we want using this box,

or just by using our middle-mouse button.

Alternatively, if you don't have a scroll button on your mouse,

you can hold down the Alt button, click the middle-mouse button,

and dragging back and forth will zoom you in or zoom you out,

and if you let go of that Alt button, and middle-mouse click again,

it's going to let you pan around.

Now you can also use the plus and minus keys on your

keyboard to zoom in and zoom out, based on wherever the mouse is positioned.

So if I move the mouse over here, and I hit the minus button on the keyboard,

it's going to zoom out from that point.

You can also select your entire comp and hit the F button,

and that will frame what you've selected in the Node Graph.

Another neat thing that you can do with these different

view levels is save bookmarks out.

So if we go to the beginning of the tree,

if I click on this node and I hit F to zoom into that node,

and I want to save the beginning of this comp tree as a bookmark,

I can right-click over here, I can go to Edit,

and there's a menu called Bookmark here.

And I can save this location by clicking this button,

and then if I move to another part of the tree,

let's say I'm working somewhere way, way over here,

and I want to get back there, I just right-click,

and I say Restore Location 1, and it's going to jump me right back there.

And those bookmarks are recording the zoom level and the pan level to

bring you to exactly the place you were before.

So it's helpful to just save a bookmark when you get started so that you can

jump right back to the beginning of the comp if you need to,

or if you get lost in a comp later.

It's also important to note at this point,

that nodes themselves can be bookmarked.

So let's take a look at that.

If I pan down to the end of the comp, let's say this is the end of the comp,

this ColorCorrect node,

and we want to be able to bring that up really quickly and really easily when

we're working later so that we can bound around the comp,

make changes, and then jump right back to the end.

We can go back to the Node tab that we looked at earlier,

and I'll slide this window out so that you can see everything a little better,

there's an attribute down here called Bookmark.

So I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to check that on,

and what that's going to do is that's going to add this node to a list

of bookmarks that NUKE is keeping in its memory.

And so if I go back up here and I'm in a different part of the comp,

I can right-click, and I can go to Jump to Bookmarked Node,

and a list of all of the nodes that I have bookmarked,

all of the nodes that I have this attribute checked for will pop up here,

and I can just select it and it will jump me right to the node.

And this is really, really useful in production,

and I hope it serves you as well as it's served me.

Now just to wrap up here,

there's another neat feature that you should know about,

and it's another thing that's really helpful when you're in big,

big comps, but if you right-click on the Node Graph here,

and you go to Search, there's a search box that pops up.

And this search box lets you look for any viewer

that you might have in the comp.

The same way you search for files on Windows or the same

way you search for things on Google,

you can just type in what you're looking for here

and it'll jump you right to it.

So let's see if we can find that EarthBlur node.

If I just type in EarthBlur, and hit Enter,

you see it jumped right to it, and if I navigate away from this too,

you can go back to that Search menu,

and know that you can use asterisks as wildcards in the search.

So let's say I have a bunch of Blur nodes in the comp and I don't

remember that that specific Blur node was called EarthBlur,

I can just type *Blur,

and it will select any of the blurs that I have in the comp.

One last feature here that I'd like to show you is how to

auto arrange the nodes inside of your comp.

So if your comp is pretty dirty and these things

are all over the place like this,

what you can do is you can select all of these things,

you can right-click, and you can go to Edit,

Node, and you can say Autoplace,

and it will rearrange your comp to be nice and tight.

And so if you're somebody that likes to keep your comps clean,

like I do, the Autoplace is a great tool to use for that.