compositing

Week 1

Part 1

 

Part 2
This is the Nuke viewport:

Nuke use nodes when making any changes to a piece of footage. It’s a great system that allows anyone to view a nuke file and understand what’s going on in a flow chart system. The moment you open up a nuke file there will be a viewer node. By pressing 1,2,3 etc you can switch views between different parts of the nuke flowchart.

Pressing ‘Tab’ a search bar appears that can be used to pick any nodes in nuke and add it in to the scene.

Pressing a number on the keyboard while selecting a node in the scene will make that point in the sequence show up on the viewing area.

The transform node which has been added in the picture above helps move the subject in the scene. When selected the settings for the node will appear on the far right of the Nuke interface. Here the settings for the different nodes can be adjusted.

 

My first thoughts on Nuke is how similar it is to Adobe After Effects. There both compositing tools that put together a video. However Nuke is more advanced and industry standard whereas After effects is good but not relied on as much as Nuke. Nuke follows flow charts similar to my experiences in Unreal engine 5. This lesson, I paid close attention to the lecture so I wouldn’t fall behind and fail to understand the software. So far I understand everything that I’ve been taught about Nuke. However this has only been a 3 hour learning experience so we will see if I fall behind later in the year. Coming back from summer break I am eager to learn more and put way more effort and attention in to my work. I feel like I struggled in the final moments of my projects last year so I want to really push my work towards potentially getting in to my show reel.

 

10/10/24 week 2

Week 2 consisted of rotoscoping building rooftops as well as jelly beans using the Bezier tool. How to manually track subjects within a scene using key frames. It also allows use to change the colour of a subject and add blur effects.

This is a basic tool that will be essential for my future in Nuke.

The roto tool is very important and allows for imagery to be separated and help key out specific parts in a piece of film. This can then help Nuke single out parts that you want to change.

The example we used for week 2 was a piece of video footage. By using the roto node we were able to single out a rooftop. We chose a clear frame of the rooftop in the sequence and used that as our hero point.

After keying out the rooftop that I wanted to make the subject of the sequence the time line turned blue on the time frame. This shows what work has been keyed at different parts on the time frame.

 

I moved the time frame to the first the first in the sequence 1001. Adjusted the roto to match the building rooftop. Nuke automatically adjusted the movements of the roto shape I had made for the building between the points I had made.

Note* Try not to make too many key points next to each other.

Week 3 17/10/24

Finger rotoscoping

This was a great exercise to use rotoscoping on a person which can be a lot trickier to accomplish. With the hand we directed it in to multiple layer for the roto to track. Manually adjusting the tracking on different frames helped give me an idea of how tricky rotoscoping can be.

Torso rotoscoping

 

week4 24/10/24

 

 

For this lesson we separated the picture with the bridge by rotoscoping out the scenery and the sky for image 1. This involved us fixing the background by adding a blur effects to make the scenery more natural as well as removing a green outline from the roto.

Step by step on changing the background

Luminance alpha key pick up on the colours of an image. It can change the saturation and help the alpha channel mask out parts of the image.
The copy node replaces channels in the B input to the A input. The B will go into the background channel while the A arrow will go into the other node that will mask over.
Merge the results of a channel. Saves the information into the next node.
Blur node adjusts blurriness. There’s an example below of before and after. Minor changes.

Homework: remove back ground from lady wearing dress

It’s important to roto these little white bits in the corners if there are any. In the top right of the image above you can see this example. Otherwise it can mess things up when merging the roto in to a scene.

It’s important to make sure the Alpha of the image is as bright as possible when rotoscoping a subject. Just so that when the image is merged in to a scene it doesn’t come out with bits of the image disconnected.

For the homework I removed the background by rotoscoping the lady in the blue dress and merging it with the background using the same nodes that I used for the bridge scenery. One piece of criticism I have for myself doing the homework is with the green outlines of the Lady. Sadly I couldn’t remove them because there was a node I originally used that was downloaded off of a separate site that I couldn’t find.

week 5    31/10/24

 

Colour and Grading is the focus of this session. We used Colour correction tools and settings to change the statues in the distance so that they would fit in with the setting. You can see that the original assets that are added in are very different in terms of color. I end up changing it to a much darker blue that fits in with the rocks.

Week 6    07/11/24

 

For this car exercise we used a tracking feature to create a mask for the window screen for the car. I found that the tracking wasn’t amazing so I had to assist by manually heling the key points keep up with the car. The reason why the tracking wasn’t amazing was because there weren’t any significant colors for the trackers to latch on to. Another reason is the movement from the car.

This exercise was for us to go through and fix a bunch of bad nodes that had been purposely sabotaged. This exercise was so that we’d understand the common mistakes that can be made in Nuke. I tried my best with the exercise. The top image is what I ended up getting and the bottom image is the perfect image that I was trying to get. You can try and spot some differences that I didn’t achieve such as the water. If you notice there’s a reflection I couldn’t quite get rid of.

 

Week 7  14/11/24 noise grain

Week 7 we used grain, tracking and rotoscoping to change the the overall noise of the scene.

First exercise with the green screen involved me tracking and removing the points in the background. This is a standard thing to do as a compositor and using this simple exercise I will be able to track anything to those points in the scene.
In this exercise we removed the Man from the scene and turned off the roto when the 2 ladies walk in to the roto box. Otherwise the ladies disappear before the clip ends.

When using the Grain press ‘W’ and the ley will pop up on to the view port where the Grain can be adjusted on the different channels.

 

Week 8

 

Assignment 1 – Due 2pm Friday 17th January

The first assignment for Composition in Nuke is to fix a video. Replace Green screen, remove logos, the whole lot. Simple yet necessary changes that have to be made by a compositor.

Week 9

Week 9 was a combination of the things we’ve learnt in Nuke over the 9 weeks so far. The lesson was split in to two parts. Part 1 consisted of us keying out a logo and replacing it with another. Using the planar Tracker node to track the logos joumey in the video and then replacing it with the rotopaint. The roto paint copies information elsewhere and pastes it on to the curser that the users has selected. In other words it can hide information in a video or picture.

Above is the original image. Nothing has happened in this moment. In this exercise we will be removing the MEX post background.

Choose a hero frame and roto around the logo using the roto tool. Planar track the points forward so Nuke can track it in the video.

Corner Pin 2D relative baked. This will create trackers that will hold on to the video in specific coordinates.

Corner pin must have the from points copied over so it can keep tracking the pixel coordinates that its been set. Also remove animation.

Using the roto paint remove the logo with the clone option.

Used a roto to remove the logo on the video. This essentially copies the rotopaint I used and places it over the logo area.

Feathered the roto to give a fade away effect on the outside.

Looped it round to the original clip with a merge and placed the trackers in so the fully clip can have the logo taken out.

Added in a new logo to place over the old one and look natural with additional lighting modifications underneath the image’s node.

I did the exact same for the second logo as an exercise. Tried to see if I could remember all the steps from my head.

This lesson looks like a little guide on how to do the Keying for the logo on the case for assignment one. I’ve already done this part using a different method that I will talk about.

Part 2

05/12/24   Update on assignment

I’ve been working on the first assignment for a few weeks now. My progress has been alright, however I’ve hit a stump on the project.

I’m struggling a bit with changing the green screen to a different colour as well as changing the tv screen. I know how to take out the marks on the wall pretty easily and also change the colour of the red board.  I’ll use the roto paint tool with the clone option to remove the tape. For the red board, since nothing is moving in front of it I can roto it out.

I’m proud of myself for starting a project in advance. This was something I left quite late with my previous projects last year. I will try to explain below how I try to do things on my nuke file on this blog.

 

week 10  05/12/24 Advanced keying

Index of /tearsofsteel/tearsofsteel-footage-exr

Final project assignment – Fix the video filmed in the studio by changing the background, removing logo and projecting a fake screen on to the monitor.

My process of the project

When making the script for my Nuke project I wanted to make sure that everything was tidy and could read easily. I didn’t want for a script that was messy and hard to keep track of. I’d also like top note that I found the assignment challenging and had a few attempts at different ideas and scripts.

I learned from these failed attempts such as the one above and improved on them by referencing the lessons on class. The final result ended up looking a lot cleaner and easier to read through.

Logo removal

The logo removal was the first task I started with when attempting the project. I referenced a video for this task that would not only allow me to remove the logo successfully but also attach another logo. This would allow me to get more creative for the creative part of the assignment.

Nuke Paint || How To Remove Text And Add Logo Using Planar Track || Nuke Tutorial [HINDI]

As you can see I froze the frame at 1020. this was the starting frame of the video. Using the roto paint cloning tool I could hide the logo. I also changed the lifetime to every frame so that they would stay there for the entire video.

After that I mask merged a roto of the general area of the logo so I could hide the roto paint and logo from showing. Attached to that is a planar tracker keeping the roto paint work and the roto on the bag at all times. The corner pin uses the planar tracker as reference for the roto paint work to cling to, giving a nice final result where the logo isn’t noticeable.

Tracker removal

This was both the hardest and easiest step in the project. I took out all of the trackers apart from the ones that the man walks past. I left the two trackers that he walks past for later. It ended up being the last thing I did to the project.

Since the trackers weren’t moving I used the same roto paint tool to remove the trackers. Using a roto to go round all the trackers and a copy node I could remove all the trackers that weren’t behind Tim.

I used the two roto nodes to cover each other on the two trackers that Tim would walk past. I don’t think was the best way for keeping the trackers hidden, however it was the only way that I could think of for completing the task.

Keying

A straightforward task that was simple and quick. I used a keylight to take the green background allowing me to replace it with a blue constraint node with a simple merge tool. I also used a premult to help fix up the work from the keylight.

The colorspace and the denoise is mean to make the pixels clearer improving the quality from the blue background coming in. I had no problem at all with this section very simple method. Came out looking good.

Tim roto TV

It took me a while to decide how I was going to tackle this task. Looking back I think it was a simple challenge. I ended up rotoing Tim as soon as he walked in front of the screen with a roto node. This was to prevent the information being displayed on the monitor form going over Tim when he was walking past.

As for the TV projection I used a roto node to mark the outline of the screen. Copy node to combine the colorbars image which I rotated with the transform node.