Nuke vs Shake

[vivekm]

Hi,

For someone who is looking to move from Shake4.1 to Nuke 4.5 and beyond, I
would like to ask all the Nuke guru's here their unbiased comments on following

1. Nuke vs Shake Paint

2. Nuke Keyer vs Shake

3. Nuke Roto vs Shake

4. Nuke Caching vs Shake

5. Nuke Render Speed vs Shake.

This breif comparison would help all those sitting on the fence with Shake4.1 being EOL.

Rgds
Vivek Malhotra
F/X GRAPHICS
Mumbai, India

[Aruna]

1)Both suck at paint. If I must choose, I prefer Shake's paint.
2)Nuke has more options and is much better in that respect.
3)Same as Shake. I prefer Nuke's by a slim margin.
4)Nuke has way better caching and memory management.
5)About the same, it seems, but haven't timed it personally. I think Nuke has the advantage here.



1. Nuke vs Shake Paint
2. Nuke Keyer vs Shake
3. Nuke Roto vs Shake
4. Nuke Caching vs Shake
5. Nuke Render Speed vs Shake.

[Diogo Girondi]

1. Both terrible, but Shake one is a little better. Dustbusting in Nuke is easier.

2. Nuke. More options, better Primatte implementation and channels make things way easier and cleaner to deal with.

3. Nuke specially if you take into account channels

4. Nuke by far. FrameCycler is great and caching works far better.

5. I think Nuke is a bit faster

Overall Nuke is far superior in terms of workflow, technology, scripting and customization. Macros (gizmos) in Nuke rule, all float, kick ass OpenEXR support, real 3D environment among other features.

And let's not forget to mention Color correction features which is something that Nuke is great at it.

[throb]

5. Nuke Render Speed vs Shake.


I did a test a long while back and nuke was between 30 -200% faster than shake using evil things like defocus and radial blurs.

to nuke users out there...
what do you think of working and workflow speed? better than shake?
i grew up with nuke so i am not a good judge but i have seen people double their performance with nuke so i am curious what you guys have found...

[Aruna]

what do you think of working and workflow speed? better than shake?
i grew up with nuke so i am not a good judge but i have seen people double their performance with nuke so i am curious what you guys have found...

Hey Rob.. Compared to shake, and my accelerated week of transitioning from Shake to Nuke, I much prefer Nuke's workflow and organization capabilities. The ability to assign keystrokes and hotkeys to regular events and tools is great, the color organization and note taking capabilities put what Shake has to shame, and the interface is just great. On our current show we're switching between Shake and Nuke, and Shake is quite archaic (both in interface layout and useability)! The ease of creating gizmos is much easier than the macro creator in Shake. And of course, the ability to contain 64 channels of information at a time is a godsend. It makes for much easier and readable scripts.

Ya, I'm a Nuke convert, but I'll use Shake when necessary.

[Diogo Girondi]

Nuke is one of the first compositing applications that I saw where expressions really does work. It opens a bunch of new doors to you to knock, it's just great.

I still miss some gestural features in Nuke (like the ones found in Flame for instance) but for me it's faster and clever then Fusion and Shake and even then Flame in severall aspects.

What can I say, the damn thing just rulez!

[rueter]

to nuke users out there...
what do you think of working and workflow speed? better than shake?
i grew up with nuke so i am not a good judge but i have seen people double their performance with nuke so i am curious what you guys have found...


Well, I grew up with Shake and used to love it. Seven years later I decided it was time to say goodbye and Nuke made me realize what should be possible these days.
I used to jump back and forth between the two last year at Weta and at some point couldn't take it anymore and decided to stick with Nuke despite the fact that it wasn't fully integrated in the pipeline yet (which due to the tcl nature of Nuke I could easily fix myself without having to go through our pipeline coders).

As for interactiveness:
Render times on the wall and such is one thing that is relatively easy to put up with but when you're used to Nuke's interactiveness going back to Shake is like hitting a wall at full speed.

There are a few things that Shake is better at, such as global proxy handling without having to set up formats and.....mh.... yeah, I think that's mainly it.
The rest is mostly a matter of getting used to (such as multi channel workflow as opposed to sticking a million pipes into an extra matte input in the n ode's side).

And, as everybody else pointed out, there are a lot of other things that make Nuke far superior once you got a grip on it.

I do miss a few little things like a live PlotScanline node and a readable histogram but compared to the benefits these are minor issues that can probably be fixed with gizmos.

Speaking of which, when building serious macros in Shake you spend 90% of your time in a text editor and as a non-programmer I used to have a hard time memorizing syntax for simple functions or even simple UI widgets.
In Nuke you just do it all in the gui and when you do have to resort to a text editor to five deeper into customizing Nuke the extended tcl syntax makes sense and is easy to read/parse and remember.

Nuke is certainly not perfect and has a lot of quirks but there is no such thing as a perfect software anyway and I for myself rediscovered comping and have a lot more fun doing my work since I made the switch.

[stevenbray1]

I go into Photoshop to do my painting if I can! :D

Certainly for fine control when removing tracking markers behind someone's hair etc. I would only use Shake if someone put a gun to my head.

The more I hear about Nuke the more interesting it sounds...

[vivekm]

Hi,

Thanks for your replies.

So it looks like Nuke is weak in Paint for sure and
also its Roto has a different way of working with lot of nodes
needed to do roto.

1. Will Silhouette Roto/Paint do the trick here if the pipeline
needs to be broken into Roto/Paint on Silhouette and final
compositing on Nuke.
Silhouette does a very good job and a Nuke import/export I believe
is on the way very soon as read on their forums.

2. The Tutorial for Nuke are not as organised like it is in Shake
wherein the Basic/ Intermediate and Advanced Tuts really
get a newcomer comfortable.

Are the two Gnomon DVD and one Cmivfx DVD worth using
as a training tool?

Are the Gnomon and cmivfx DVD's showing an older version of
Nuke or they are good enough for newcomers to learn Nuke easily
even with version 4.5

3. Aruna this one is especially for you, can you benchmark a render
test for a complex project you have both on Shake and Nuke, this
would really provide some really pratical benchmarks.

4. Caching of Nodes in Shake 4.1 does'nt work as advertised , is this
area addressed by Nuke in a better way?

5. How is Sound supported in Nuke?

Rgds
Vivek Malhotra
F/X GRAPHICS
Mumbai, India

[throb]

Hi,

So it looks like Nuke is weak in Paint for sure and
also its Roto has a different way of working with lot of nodes
needed to do roto.

yeah but i have seen people ditch other software in favor of nuke's roto as well.



1. Will Silhouette Roto/Paint do the trick here if the pipeline
needs to be broken into Roto/Paint on Silhouette and final
compositing on Nuke.

if they do direct export then that's awesome!



2. The Tutorial for Nuke are not as organised like it is in Shake
wherein the Basic/ Intermediate and Advanced Tuts really
get a newcomer comfortable.

Are the two Gnomon DVD and one Cmivfx DVD worth using
as a training tool?

I speak very biased on the subject because i am the author of the gnomon dvds. :)
The gnomon dvd's cover every major node of the app and even some minor ones. The first dvd is around 5 hours of material. dvd2 is more about compositing training using nuke and i have had a few people email me and tell me it's been one of the best compositing tutorials they have watched, period. I really appreciate that because I know that teaching comp is actually really tricky!
I haven't seen the CMI dvd but I go over keying quite a bit on my dvd's.

they are made with 4.3 but while 4.5 is different the tasks are the same and you will be able to understand what i am doing. of course this doesn't cover the ui changes in 4.5. if you're coming into nuke from zero i feel you can get up to good speed watching them. again, i am biased :)

[Diogo Girondi]

I go into Photoshop to do my painting if I can! :D

Certainly for fine control when removing tracking markers behind someone's hair etc. I would only use Shake if someone put a gun to my head.

The more I hear about Nuke the more interesting it sounds...

The only problem I see with using Photoshop for painting is when you need to replace a plate you have to redo all of your work. That’s why I tend to do everything inside de compositing app whenever I can.

Shake paint is better then Nuke’s one but is far from being great either. I end up using C* for my paint work, it works like a charm.


So it looks like Nuke is weak in Paint for sure and
also its Roto has a different way of working with lot of nodes
needed to do roto.

Today I rather have a single node per shape then several shapes in a single node, this avoids you from messing with the wrong vertex and makes you keyframes visibility easier to keep track. When things start to get too huge you can always group your Bezier nodes.

As for Nuke’s paint it stills very primitive, not that reliable and misses certain features. But it does the work for simple stuff, and some of the missing features can be solved by adding a few more nodes to your flow. A revamped version would be great though. For dust busting you don’t need to use Paint, you can use the dust bust node which works great.


1. Will Silhouette Roto/Paint do the trick here if the pipeline
needs to be broken into Roto/Paint on Silhouette and final
compositing on Nuke.
Silhouette does a very good job and a Nuke import/export I believe
is on the way very soon as read on their forums.

Silhouette is great is great for heavy roto work and especially for companies that have a roto department/professionals that feed the comp artist with mattes. You can export your roto from Silhoette using SSF format and then import them in Nuke using ssf importer (http://www.fxshare.com/nuke/downloads/tcl_scripts/ssf-importer-4148.html) by Remy Torre.


2. The Tutorial for Nuke are not as organised like it is in Shake
wherein the Basic/ Intermediate and Advanced Tuts really
get a newcomer comfortable.

I agree that Nuke docs and tuts are far from being great but I personally rather have messy docs and a app in constant development then perfect docs and a turtle like development with ridiculous updates. Shake docs are great (specially the Nothing Real ones which were a fun reading) so I believe D2 has some serious work to do regarding their documentation.

But I also think that Nuke isn’t a good starting point for people that are starting to learn compositing, and more experience people can find their way without reading much of the manuals. Of course that this doesn’t mean that better documentation isn’t needed.


Are the two Gnomon DVD and one Cmivfx DVD worth using
as a training tool?

Are the Gnomon and cmivfx DVD's showing an older version of
Nuke or they are good enough for newcomers to learn Nuke easily
even with version 4.5

I highly recommend the Gnomon ones. As for the cmiVFX ones they are pretty basic and deal mostly with operational aspects without much theory. They both use older releases of Nuke, but much of the stuff remains the same except for a few things like the 3D ‘module’ where you’ll see some differences.


4. Caching of Nodes in Shake 4.1 does'nt work as advertised , is this
area addressed by Nuke in a better way?

Yeah, in Nuke it works :)

Nuke disk caching works great, never had much problems with it.


5. How is Sound supported in Nuke?

It ain’t, and so far I haven’t missed. But would certainly be a plus ;)

[stevenbray1]

The only problem I see with using Photoshop for painting is when you need to replace a plate you have to redo all of your work. That’s why I tend to do everything inside de compositing app whenever I can.

<SNIP>


I'm not sure I understand that?

If I have a tricky edge, a tracking marker behind hair (was the example I gave) it's generally much easier (and faster) to do that in Photoshop.

Copying a little bit of CLEAN hair from another frame, pasting and balancing the levels to make it match.

Anything which is the same from one frame to another I can create a patch for (a PSD layer) and track/hand-move it into place.

"Quick Paint" is a node I use for the "quickest" of painting tasks. Which is where it gets it's name from I think?

[Diogo Girondi]

I'm not sure I understand that?

If I have a tricky edge, a tracking marker behind hair (was the example I gave) it's generally much easier (and faster) to do that in Photoshop.

Copying a little bit of CLEAN hair from another frame, pasting and balancing the levels to make it match.

Anything which is the same from one frame to another I can create a patch for (a PSD layer) and track/hand-move it into place.

My point is that you can do exactly the same thing when comping in a procedural way keeping the current colorspaces and whitout having to bother about color inconsistencies and stuff, so any change made bofere that is automatically propageted trough the rest of your flow. That's why I avoid using PS for theses kind of tasks.

For instance, if you're working in a pipeline where the Color Grading is done before the comp each time there is a new graded version of your plate you would have to redo all of your PS work. Doing it in the compositing all you need to do is replace your plate and voila!

Plus it reduces a bit the file management madness and you have constant access to it without having to switch applications.

[stevenbray1]

That's all true.

However wiith keying and the removal of tracking markers from greenscreens I've found that the matte generated from the cleaned plate still works in the cases where the image plate is re-graded.

Generally when I've had a second version of a plate it hasn't been regraded anyway, just had it's duration changed due to a new edit.

And as I say, painting in Shake is slow torture (emphasis on the slow!). Especially once you start working on 4k images (or bigger).

You have to make each choice according to each the shot.

EDIT:
Additionally, lots of paint strokes at render time slows down the final composite too. What a fun job we all have!!!:spacedout

[Reezo]

I have done a little painty painty in Shake (3k) And after 10frames of doing many many paintstrokes, Shake just didn't start anymore. After rendering the last previous Shakefile and doing a Quickpaint operator over the rendered footage, everything worked fine again. But it is really slow. Well at least its better and more comfortable than Nuke (4.5).
The 3d-space in Nuke is nice but i miss things like lights and a working relighting option. The support told me they are working on it, though.
For the rest of comp tasks, Nuke is superior (like it was already said above).
Oh, is anyone using the Furnace-Plugins with Nuke 4.5?

[vivekm]

Hi,

1. Furnace for Nuke - OFX plugins are still not supported
as confirmed with TheFoundry guys.

2. Sapphire is not supported by Nuke, which is again widely used
in Shake

I think these two plugins are very important if Nuke has to be a solid
option.

3. Has anyone tried to playback Nuke in realtime from a Disk Cache, this
is what Tremor could do but was never developed or put in Shake.
Also is there a BlackMagic or Kona support?

Rgds
Vivek Malhotra

[Reezo]

i think the implemented Framecycler is the correspondant to Tremor here and i have no problem to playback 2k cineons in realtime on my homepc (DualCore Athlon)

[Diogo Girondi]

3. Has anyone tried to playback Nuke in realtime from a Disk Cache, this
is what Tremor could do but was never developed or put in Shake.


Yeah, once cached to an disk or disk array with suficient troughput it works, otherwise it doesn't. But I used to use Zone-1 to playback things from disk most of the times.


Also is there a BlackMagic or Kona support?

Not that I'm aware of, but you can output things to a monitor using a QuadroFX with SDI output using the built-in tool from nVidia driver (haven't personally tested that).

Nuke was also supposed to have Bluefish support but it seems it's not working.

The guy behind TVZeka got in contact with 2D software to develop and release a frame buffer plugin for Decklink and a standard directX. Let's hope he can pull this of.

[vivekm]

Hi,

Has anyone here had experience using Furnace and Keylight OFX
plugins with Nuke.

Do they work as advertised?

Rgds
Vivek Malhotra

[AquariunGuru]

What is better? I noticed the similarity between the two names and GUI? I am trying to decide between the two which to buy. I can get educator discount. Any help from the experienced users of both would be nice.

T.

[NEO]

They are both available as trial versions from the foundry. Think it's a month trial versions or something. I would say furnace is pretty much rock solid in Nuke. I can not say so much about Keylight though. I leave that to someone else.


Hi,

Has anyone here had experience using Furnace and Keylight OFX
plugins with Nuke.

Do they work as advertised?

Rgds
Vivek Malhotra

[NEO]

Hi,

1. Furnace for Nuke - OFX plugins are still not supported
as confirmed with TheFoundry guys.

I don't really understand this one? Furnace for Nuke is ofx? But what to you mean? As read on this link (http://www.thefoundry.co.uk/pkg_overview.aspx?ui=E86B0EA8-748A-4D53-9FE6-323E0C482E30).

Furnace for Nuke is a sophisticated suite of 2D image processing (OFX) plug-ins, designed to enhance workflow and boost productivity for digital artists.


2. Sapphire is not supported by Nuke, which is again widely used
in Shake

Please e-mail the support of Genarts and ask for Nuke support. The more that does it the more they feel that they need to port it over to Nuke.

[Gentle Fury]

1. Nuke vs Shake Paint - I agree, neither are that great but they get the job done. They both have advantages. Shake is somewhat intuitive, but if you are like me working on painting out with a matchmover, you can only paint at frame 1 and that can be annoying. I like nukes clone brush....but it can get messy.

2. Nuke Keyer vs Shake - IBK is the best keyer i have ever used.

3. Nuke Roto vs Shake - Bezier in nuke and quickshape in shake are super similar. For some reason tho Nukes line feels too thick, or a bad color or something. I find shakes to be a little easier to deal with, but nuke is fine.

4. Nuke Caching vs Shake - Pretty much the same.

5. Nuke Render Speed vs Shake - Depends on the platform. Linux shake is SUPER fast. Mac....not so much....so in that respect Nuke. I get really irritated tho that nuke has a lot of single thread nodes that can seriously slow down render time, so condensing is necessary....but on that same note, Nuke has a fast workflow, so where you have to condense just to navigate shake when it gets heavy, its really only at render time that you have to condense in nuke....tho its always a good habit!

Aside from IBK tho the biggest draw in my opinion for me to Nuke is its workflow. It is very clean and easy to navigate and if you have 2 large displays you get a LOT of workspace.

Overall Nuke is the winner in my book. But I still go back to shake when i have something small i need to fix in my FCP timeline.

[redhorse]

So from the standpoint of one who's green to VFX . . should I learn on Nuke or learn on Shake (then move to Nuke later)?

[stevenbray1]

Learn Shake.

It's still used by more companies than Nuke and no-one seems in any hurry to dump all the software they've bought and paid for.

You're more likely to get a job that way.

[Millionflame]

I would say learn Nuke. That's what I did, and I am using Shake at work now.

I really miss Nuke. It it just so much nicer in every way that I saw, and once you learn it you will really like working in it. The Gnomon DVDs are the way to go if you want to figure it out withing a week or so.

Sure, Shake may be used more in the industry, but more companies are using Fusion or Nuke nowadays, so I would pick either one of those.

Once you learn one, you can port your skills over to the other very quickly as they all work the same basically. It's like knowing Maya and then going to 3DMax or XSI. No big deal.

[Gentle Fury]

Learn Shake.

It's still used by more companies than Nuke and no-one seems in any hurry to dump all the software they've bought and paid for.

You're more likely to get a job that way.

Actually, more and more companies are now moving to Nuke. Shake ops are everywhere. If you know nuke you have a major advantage, as most companies are full of shake ops wanting to step up to nuke, but noone knows it.

[stevenbray1]

It's a good theory but the best way to apply it is to learn Shake, so you can work anywhere, THEN learn Nuke, so you can make yourself more valuable.

Nuke's user base IS expanding but even The Foundry don't claim it's expanding that fast.

EDIT:
The important thing is to get in someplace and start clocking up the experience to put on your CV/Resume and shots for your reel.

[redhorse]

It's a good theory but the best way to apply it is to learn Shake, so you can work anywhere, THEN learn Nuke, so you can make yourself more valuable.

Nuke's user base IS expanding but even The Foundry don't claim it's expanding that fast.

EDIT:
The important thing is to get in someplace and start clocking up the experience to put on your CV/Resume and shots for your reel.

This is precisely what I have decided to do. I'm starting with the shake tutorials that come with it. Then doing the gnomon DVDs to bring me to intermediate (im really impressed with these btw). Then fxphd to bring me to advanced. Hopefully by then I'll have enough decent work in my reel that I can get a roto gig somewhere or at least do freelance.

[graemaster]

Hmmmm...interesting topic...i have been comping in shake for =/- 2 years now and was previously comping in combustion...loved and still love shake...

but recently started learning nuke... much much more spped power and the 3d space...perfect!!! i suppose they all just tools but im fond of nukes speed and robust interface!!!!

[Gentle Fury]

It's a good theory but the best way to apply it is to learn Shake, so you can work anywhere, THEN learn Nuke, so you can make yourself more valuable.

Nuke's user base IS expanding but even The Foundry don't claim it's expanding that fast.

EDIT:
The important thing is to get in someplace and start clocking up the experience to put on your CV/Resume and shots for your reel.

Well, I've been using shake for 7 years now....and have always loved it. I've been using Nuke for about 6 months now. And for me, yes it is an advantage that I know both...but more people are like....you know nuke, really....hmmm.

[jerryh]

1. Furnace for Nuke - OFX plugins are still not supported
as confirmed with TheFoundry guys.


Furnace for Nuke is indeed OFX. It's not to be confused with Furnace for older versions of Nuke which didn't support OFX.

[Gentle Fury]

Furnace for Nuke is indeed OFX. It's not to be confused with Furnace for older versions of Nuke which didn't support OFX.

yeah, ive used furnace in nuke and it works fine.