Ben's Comp Newsletter: Issue 061
|
|
Hey,
I hope you're doing well and staying
productive. This week, I've got a collection
of some super interesting stuff to share
with you!
|
|
Experiments with TimeBlur.
|
|
According to Foundry's
documentation, the TimeBlur
node was designed to mimic real-world
motionblur. However, Chris
Fryer has found an incredibly
inventive use for the TimeBlur
node; he's using sub-frame information
from expressions to generate some
interesting results, and has written about
it on his blog.
|
|
Quick Tip: Animate scene states, not
knob values.
|
|
We’ve all had one of those shots where our
CG animates through frame and needs to
change from one lighting condition to
another. Perhaps this is a character
travelling from indoors to outdoors,
flashing lights in a scene, or an object
passing through atmospheric haze; it can
come in many forms.
There are a few ways we can deal with these
types of shots in Nuke. The most common
solution I see is: Compositors animating
lots of knobs on lots of nodes to match the
lighting changes in the plate. However, this
method quickly becomes inefficient as soon
as your lighter renders a new version, as it
means every keyframe needs to be tweaked and
re-balanced. It also opens the door to more
human error!
The optimal way to go about handling these
shots is to set up static scene
states for each lighting
condition. What I mean by
this is: find some hero frames in your shot
where different lighting conditions are most
prominent, and set up your comp separately
for each individual lighting condition. Then
you can simply animate
one Dissolve node to
transition between each state!
When lighting renders you some fancy new
updates, or you get notes in dailies, you
won’t have to scrape through plenty of nodes
in your Nuke script to make sure every
keyframe on every node looks correct.
Instead, you simply polish the look on your
hero frame, and your states animate
predictably — the way they always have!
Speaking of states, I love Hagbarth‘s Nuke
View Manager for quickly
labelling and jumping between frames / scene
states. You can download
this tool from Mads' GitHub.
|
|
Speaking of Mads
Hagbarth Damsbo's
creations, QuickCreate provides
a convenient way to convert a Viewer's
colour sample box to all sorts of things.
For example, it adds shortcuts to create a
CornerPin, Crop,
Keylight, etc.
Check out the tool in action in this
demo video.
|
|
A scholarly approach to the Film vs.
Digital discussion.
|
|
The debate about whether film or digital is
better has been ongoing since, well, the
invention of digital. Is the aesthetically
pleasing look of capturing images on film
worth giving up the convenience and
flexibility of shooting digital?
Cinematographer Steve
Yedlin, known for collaborations
with Rian
Johnson on films like Knives
Out and The
Last Jedi, has some incredibly
interesting and informed views on this
subject. He argues that no matter what
format you shoot, there is always a
necessary intermediate step of transforming
that captured data to pixels, and that
process can and should be manipulated by
filmmakers to achieve their desired
look.
This
article provides a brief overview of
the topic, however, I strongly recommend a
deep dive into Steve's
website for more technical, in-depth
examples. Here are the top 3 resources I'd
recommend you look at:
Steve also has some fascinating thoughts on
perceptual resolution vs. pixel count, and
shares his insights in two Resolution
Demo videos. He shines a light
on pixel count being primarily a marketing
tool, and how it's possible (and ideal) to
have a perceptually sharper image at 2k vs.
6k!
Cheers to Simon
Herden for sharing this with me.
|
|
Do you have something to
share?
If
you have any
feedback on how this
newsletter could
provide more value
to you or others, or
just want to share
your creations,
please reply to this
email -- I'd love to
hear it all!
|
|
|
Thanks to my Patreon
Supporters.
This issue
of Ben's
Comp
Newsletter is
sponsored by
Keegen
Douglas.
|
|
|
Aaron Bradford
Adam Kelway
Adrian Winter
Aman Arora
Anton Moss
Antonio Gabarrón
Attila Gasparetz
Ben Cecioni
Brent Veal
Christian Morin
Ciaran O Neachtain
Dan McCarthy
David Ventura
Denys Holovyanko
Eduardo Cardoso
Ed Englander
Federico
Fredrik Larsson
Gary Kelly
Hugo's Desk
|
Ian Failes
Igor Majdandzic
Ivan Sorgente
Jan Stripek
Julien Laperdrix
Kim
Kris Janssens
Lee Watson
Matt
Micheal Liuyu
Michael Loithaler
MMM
Santosh Seshabhattar
Seth Weber
Shih Yi Peng
Stu Maschwitz
Suresh Pandi
Tiscar Coig
Vincent Desgrippes
William Towle
+ 2 Anonymous
others...
|
|
If you get value from
reading Ben's Comp
Newsletter every other
week, please consider contributing via
Patreon to help keep it running!
|
|
|
|
|
