All right, so this section is all about getting you comfortable with nuke, especially if you are totally new to compositing or are just a super a nerd. So no worries. I am taking it slow acknowledging the request from some of my recent feedback that I was too much of a Speedy Gonzales. So yes, so, navigating around mute. It's very intuitive because as mentioned in our previous lesson, nuke is context sensitive, and very easily customizable. Plus, you can always open up another instance of nuke.

If you want to follow along a nuke script tutorial, for example, and like after effects, it will actually not replace your existing work. Open up over your existing workflow or create a new one. As you can see there's two instances of nuke running right now that I have open Now nuke is best done and navigated around with a mouse and a tablet but both work and I'll show you how to use both. Now if you're on a Wacom tablet, you just press and hold Alt, click to move around and pan around and you move a Wacom and then press and hold the middle mouse button with a mouse to drag and pan around in nuke. So let's go anti clockwise here starting with the top bar. Now the top bar includes very general macro functions, in other words, big kind of big boy actions, and it's almost easier performance shortcut keys and hotkeys most of the time.

Now the most important drop down menus you probably had to know his workspace, cache viewer and help. So very briefly, workspace as we covered in previous lesson is basically all about setting an ideal workspace for you. So let's say I want to go to Capozzi. I'm going to compositing I went to scripting, animation etc. Now cash is way actually going to clear up your memory space. So it is That allows quicker render or in software preview and stuff like that viewer you create a new viewer as we've done earlier on, and then help if you need any additional help in nuke with keyboard shortcuts, documentation, or even, you know, just checking out the new key PDF.

Now the sidebar here is where all the real tools are at or aka the effects slash notes. Now new notes are what you would use to create those effects so they are kind of like effects layers in After Effects. different categories of notes here exist, and we'll cover this in depth in the next lesson on what each category does. Now on the screen is the viewer obviously, and you can actually import a random image into the scene and just hit on the number numerical key one. If you're using a number keypad make sure that your Num Lock is turned on and it caused multiple viewers can be set up As well by hitting Ctrl I or looking up the viewer notes, so I hit Tab search for viewer. Same thing, you can also do this by going up here viewer, and then you come down again and the gamma right here is basically to enhance the view of your image interviewer, you will actually not affect your render.

So if I, let's say, increase the gain right here and increase the gamma, it will not affect my final output, which would still look the same as you see in this clip right here. Now more about this viewer, if you go over to this icon right here, this is the proxy node. And this basically allows you to downsize your current footage. You see my numbers change here, just look at that and the number changed. scale it down to allow you to have a quicker render preview inside nuke, you can actually adjust the settings when you go to the Properties tab hit s to bring up project settings in can choose what kind of proxy more you want to use, whether it's formatting or Give you a smaller scale format all your skill with a 50% skill, which is basically half of this full size format. As you can see what I'm doing right now when I click on this icon, it scales down my footage for the sake of the review.

Now the cool thing about new is that it allows you to access a 3d mode as well and it is very efficient in use. So if I hit tab, you can see I enter immediately into a 3d scene, what you would normally see in 3d software like 3ds max or Maya, if I hit tab again, I return back to 2d view, tap again, 3d view. So how do I zoom in and zoom out. So basically, if you want to zoom in and zoom out on your viewer actually on anywhere else, you just hit the plus and minus key. You can also do this in a note graph plus and minus. And let's say if you want to frame everything up back to its original you can hit F and you frame things up just like in your node graph can hit F. You can also hit the minimize button and you actually do the same thing.

Frame your viewer or you know graph up to the center, timeline wise, just hit home and enter to go to the first and last frame of your clip. And the arrow keys to go frame by frame shift left or right to jump 10 frames ahead or behind. Now let's see if I've made an effect. I'm just going to reset this very quickly. And let's say I've made some effects I hit B, I'm just going to blow the crap out of this just so we could see the difference. I want to do some A B testing Do I need to create a second view and basically just put it side by side like this to do a B testing?

Well, it's not necessary, because in nuke, this is tool that allows you to do a B testing within this one view itself. So if I hit W, and I changed this A and B and put basically if I click on my clip, I hit one to set the A s one and then go to my blur node, click on it. Hit To the number two, in order to allow multiple inputs for a viewer, you can see I already have an instant A B testing tool set up. Now for those of you who are really new and this is getting a little bit confusing to you, how can I can use multiple inputs for my viewer. Now I see this thing is very unique to new where you can actually have multiple input plugs into a single viewer node and can change them iteratively based on your purpose in use.

So multiple inputs into just one single view and node is possible. And of course, if you just hit 123 and cycle between them, you can see the changes in the knowledge graph to show you which one you are currently viewing. Now what if I find that this tool is a little bit annoying, and I just want to see the footage itself, you can actually turn this off. This is called Overlay and in nuke the shortcut key to turn off the overlay is q you see this little text right here that says my overlays off and now you can see that my tool Gizmo is completely gone. I'm just going to turn this back on. Go back to one, which the input is coming from the original clip.

Now, Node Graph basics, how do I bring in effects? What do you do is basically hit tab. And as we've mentioned in the previous lesson, you have to kind of know what you're looking for, unless you have to scroll through this crazy list. But if not, if you know even the first letter of what you're looking for, let's say grain, you can just hit G, and nuke will be smart enough to tell you which ones start with G. And you can find in UCS in your node graph, can even hit tab, and it will automatically detect the first one in a list. So let's say I want text to see. Same thing if I say H, and I want the first one, I just hit tab and it will autocomplete and select the first one in the list.

So let's just practice that and bring in a bunch of notes right now. Even if you don't know what they mean. Just do that. Get used to the idea. Okay. Now let's say it's getting a little bit messy, right, and then you want to scale this up a little bit, so you have more space, but you don't really want to make this smaller than your default screen.

So what you can do is enlarge each space, you hit the spacebar key, and then minimize button click, you can basically enlarge your working space. Now, obviously, you scale up the node graph, so you can't see anything else. But you actually can do this with any panel or pane that you're currently hovering your mouse over. Okay, moving on the curve editor for animation. Now, we're not actually going to use this that much. But let's say you have a few keyframes.

It's kind of like the editor tool in Maya or 3ds Max, where you can basically adjust your curves. Same thing with dope sheet, except is listing it based on keyframes instead of a curve. Okay, so we covered a lot right now in this area. But what about this tab now you probably saw a bunch of stuff stuffs stacking up whenever I create a new node. And this is normal, because what newbie does is after I create something new, it'll automatically open up the properties in the Properties tab to basically say, Hey, I have a note here, do something with me. Now, you don't want to have to scroll through all these, it gets pretty long and pretty annoying.

So you see this number right here. It basically tells you how many in a stat you want to show. So let's see if I set one, it will only show the most recently selected or recently created node, you know, go to five and I double click on a few more 2345. Let's see we had transformed now if I hit something else, you can see that transform is gone because the maximum we wanted to show was five. Of course, it can get pretty chunky and you don't want to waste your time going individually and closing these right so what you can do is if you see this little icon right here, just click on this or Ctrl Shift a same thing. You should hotkey, I just click on it.

It'll delete everything from the Properties tab, but of course not the notes. So let's just try that again. And go here, control shift a same thing clears out my properties tab. Okay, so that should be about it a very quick walkthrough. Hopefully not too far so you guys can follow. Now speaking of nodes, how do we know which to use and when and how exactly do they work?

Well, that is exactly what we will cover in the next lesson.