why you need an open relationship
There I was, staring at After Effects, willing it to please just let this comp work. I’d tried everything I could think of and nothing was working. AE is truly my first love, but it just wouldn’t cooperate with me in my compositing dilemma. Rather than break up entirely, After Effects and I had to have a talk about an open relationship.
As much as I’d love for that story to be 100 per cent true, the spirit of it is where I found myself at the end of my layer-based compositing rope. That’s when I met Nuke – a true charmer.
The biggest difference between Nuke and After Effects is the nodeversus layer-based organisation. Node-based organisation makes a more bird’s eye view of your composite possible. When you have a huge project, sometimes this is just too much of a headache to do in a layer-based software. New nodes Let’s first talk a little bit about the terminology differences between layer- and node-based compositing. In AE, all your footage and information about the footage is stored in your project panel. This is the hub of where you go to look at comps, footage and any other media you have. In Nuke, the composite tree is the library. (Nuke Studio is an exception to this rule. You do have a media Library in Nuke Studio when you’re on the timeline.) The information about footage is stored right there on the Read Node. A Read Node is the equivalent to an After Effects layer, and Read Nodes are how you view footage and data in Nuke.
So when is a good time to use Nuke over AE? Nuke is best for working on a single shot that requires a lot of effects and tweaks to get it perfect. Maybe you need to have camera tracking, particle simulation, colour correction, and some keyed green screen footage all meshing together into a single shot. These are the moments Nuke lives for, and where it truly shines. Keeping these things straight in a series of nested precomps in After Effects simply isn’t practical. If you find yourself working on shots like this often, it’s time to take the leap and start learning Nuke. Time to transition However, so many die-hard AE fans are intimidated by transitioning to Nuke. I won’t lie; it can be a disorienting change at first, and things that Adobe takes care of in the background for you, such as alpha channels, will take on a new significance in Nuke. You’ll need to understand how things work and what maths is affecting the union of two images, but in the end, it’s worth it. I won’t say that you’ll never look back though: AE is still king of motion graphics and will be for a long time because there really is no comparison between the timeline and Nuke’s Dope Sheet.
If you’re still wondering where to start the journey of adding Nuke to your arsenal of tools, check out my tutorial Nuke for After Effects Users at www.pluralsight.com. It’s full of comparisons of what you’re familiar with in After Effects and how it all works in Nuke. Another great reason to learn Nuke is that in the last few years, the Foundry (the maker of Nuke) has made a totally free non-commercial version of the software. That effectively makes learning Nuke cheaper than After Effects for new users.
So don’t worry, an open relationship with your software isn’t wrong, it’s just the next step in your relationship of creating great work together. After Effects will understand. Like any great partner, it’s committed to helping you get the job done no matter what.