Reformatting proxies?

[poof]

Forgive me, i am a noob at nuke, but ive worked through the manual and followed online tutorials and i still am not grasping how proxies are supposed to work in nuke.

Proxies in an editor make sense, you take a downrez'd version of your source file to edit with, and then re-link to your original files upon picturelock. But with nukes proxy system, it doesnt downrez it, it reformats it, so after you've created your masks for your half-sized proxy images (if half size is what you chose to be your proxy size), when you disable your proxy in project settings, the image now becomes twice the proxy size, yet your masks stay the same. Come again? After effects treats proxies just like an editor does, but creating a lower quality version, so all you have to do is disable it and everything is 100% as it should be.

Whats even more confusing is the use of reformat nodes. So forsay ive set my project's proxy at half size, when i read in an image sequence i still must reformat it. I set what its original size and its proxy size is, and then in my reformat node i set what i want it to be. Great, but how is nuke supposed to know what the new proxy size is if there is no proxy size option in the reformat node? Does it guess based of the proxy ratio of the read node?

Yeah, im pretty lost here.

[doodle]

What version of Nuke are you running? ..and what OS are you on?

The proxy modes are all working fine for me in n5.1v3 on osx (intel) 10.5.6

Do you have a simple script that reproduces your issue?

Cheers

[Matt P]

The problem might just be that you're paying too much attention. Once you set a project format the proxy for everything is calculated from that.

If you're throwing reformats in to the mix then it's bound to mess everything up. Ae's proxies works in pretty much the same way except it hides the resolution it's showing you and calls it 'half' instead.

-Matt

[poof]

I dont really ever intend to use mutliple formats in a comp, but some of the tutorials im doing use them to show how proxies and reformats work but they dont explain any of the mechanics of it, i figured it would be good if i understood this, but your right, im probably just overthinking it. Ill just not use proxies and get a decent computer if i ever have to work with 2k+ footage.

thanks for clearing that up.

[Matt P]

Just above and to the right of the viewer, next to the proxy button there's also a down-rez dropdown which will down-rez your viewer without displaying the comp as being as proxy resolution - which might make a little more sense visually if you are more used to the way AE works.

Though ultimately, using proxies which are created as the application runs will only get you so far - Especially with 2K plates. I would always look in to rendering your own proxies at whatever res you prefer and then making sure the file-in nodes for your elements have the proxy piped in to them in their proxy setting.

Working this way will mean that your heavier loading files will use the proxy raw and smaller elements like stock footage - which would just be inconvenient to create proxies off will be treated however you've chosen in your project settings.

I hope some of that makes sense. I don't claim to be an expert.
-Matt

[gozirra]

Poof,
I think your proxy settings in properties has to match the proxies that you link to your read nodes. I just made a test to see if I was missing something, and didn't have any trouble. Nuke does not resize my images when I toggle proxy mode, it just loads the proxy. The only way I could mess it up is if I changed the proxy format in my properties to something that doesn't match my proxies.