STEP BY STEP SET UP TWO VIEWERS IN NUKE

01 INITIAL SCENE SETUP

This tutorial was created in Nuke 14 and is aimed at new users using the OCIO and ACES 1.2 config Project settings, which are accessed with the ‘S’ key. A render sequence of EXR files has been loaded into Nuke and connected to the default Viewer node. That node is set to use the SRGB (ACES) View Transform, the default for the OCIO config.

02 ADD AN ADDITIONAL VIEWER NODE

There is a range of options to add a second Viewer node into Nuke, either through the toolbar by pressing the Tab key in the node graph and typing “Viewer”, through the main application Viewer menu, or with the shortcut CTRL+I. Connect the new Viewer up to the EXR Render sequence, and set the View Transform of the second node to a suitable Hdr-ready Transform such as the P3-D65 ST2084 100 nits (ACES).

03 VIEW BOTH NODES TOGETHER

To view both nodes concurrently, click and drag the Viewer2 window to the side of the main view display. This will create a dotted outline denoting where and how much of the screen the Viewer will occupy. When the Viewer occupies half of the screen, let go of the button, and the Viewer2 screen should appear beside the Viewer1 screen.

04 ORGANISE THE SCENE

As you can now see, when placed side by side the two viewers can show drastically different colour profiles for the same render. Like most things in Nuke, these nodes can be relabelled, which in this case means denoting Viewer 1 with its task of displaying colour in a standard 8-bit fashion that’s suitable for social media, while Viewer 2 can be used to preview HDR workflows on Hdrequipped monitors.