masking workflow

[Tocy]

cheers to everyone! As a fusion and shake user, masking in nuke looks a little bit strange to me. I'm playing with it for a couple of days now, but i'm not sure I'm doing it the right way. (I mean the workflow not the actual masking, thats ok) If I have tons of bezier masks on different places of the script, each creating a channel, what is the best way to separate/mark/group them, that I can easily find and modify them? Should I do all the masks in a specific part of the script, and bringing all of them along? What if I have to combine them, should make separate channels for those as well? 64 channels don't look too much.. I'm sure the pro's have some clever advices on this...
Thank you very much
T

[Aruna]

By default, bezier creation occupies four channels, r,g,b, and a. I've set mine up so it only writes to the rgb.alpha channel. If I need to combine beziers, I use a channelmerge node. If I need to replace channels I use a copy node. If you want to place beziers into other channels other than the rgb.alpha channel, I use a copy node (or shufflecopy), and specify which output channel I want. There is no need for each bezier to have it's own channel. Just daisychain the relevant pieces together (like all pieces of a body, or full pieces of car, etc). Also, bezier masks don't necessarily need to be in the alpha channel. They can be in any other channel aside from the main R,G,B ones (those are reserved for the actual visual RGB colors).

You can mark them by putting a backdrop down and labelling the section. Or you can mass-colorcorrect the nodes, using CTRL SHIFT C. Or you can group them with CTRL G. I use backdrops and colors mostly for organization, as well as prolific notes.

Take a look at my Comping with Channels (http://www.digitalgypsy.com/vfxlog/archives/2006/12/tip_of_the_week_20.php) post. It might help.

[Tocy]

Thanks Aruna for the quick reply, and thanks for the effort you make in general for this community with valuable case studies! Now I understand a bit more, your channels tutorial was quite helpful too. So am I right when I do the following? If I have a layer that I want to heavily color correct, with a lot of masks, I start with a fileread, reformat, and then I create all the beziers I need chained/combined together, and each outputting not to the alpha(I need it as it is), but to separate channels of masklayers (like mask_tower1.lower01, mask_tower.lower02, mask_tower.upper, mask_building2.windows etc. - proper naming conventions :)) Then come the other operators. And if need a new mask, or a combined, go back and do that in that mask area of the script, and not just inserting somewhere in the middle - because this way I can use it in any other branch of that "layer", as it flows down from the top.
Thanks for the tips, greatly appreciated!
T

[nathan]

You pretty much summed it up Tocy, just create your beziers and put them in whatever channel to use as masks later on down the tree that is feed by your input.

[novefel]

Hi Aruna the link which referring is not showing up. please repost

Thanks

[Aruna]

Comping With Channels (http://www.digitalgypsy.com/vfxlog/archives/2006/12/tip-of-the-week-comping-with-c.php)