Previews and Rendering

Nuke supports a fast, high-quality internal renderer, with superior color resolution and dynamic range without a slowdown in the workflow.

About Rendering in Nuke

These are some of the key features of Nuke’s rendering engine:

• Multi-threaded rendering to take advantage of multiple processors in its calculations.

• Scanline (as opposed to buffer-based) rendering allows you to immediately see portions of render output.

• Calculations performed with 32-bit precision, using linear light levels.

This chapter teaches you how to use the renderer’s various features to preview a script’s output and generate its final elements. You’ll also learn how to preview using Flipbooking and Capture, and check output on an external broadcast video monitor.

Quick Start

Here's a quick overview of the workflow:

1.   With the Viewer, you can preview your footage and use the ROI button to focus on a particular part of it. For more information, see Previewing Output.
2.   You can then flipbook your clip. A quick way of doing this is to click the Flipbook button in the Viewer, set the frame range and other settings in the Flipbook dialog, and click OK to flipbook and automatically launch the Flipbook Viewer. See Flipbooking Sequences.
3.   Save out low resolution .jpg sequences using Capture to share your work, such as for peer review purposes. Click the Capture button in the Viewer, set the frame range and other settings in the Capture dialog, and click OK.
4.   If you’ve read in an audio clip with the AudioRead node, you can flipbook that with your footage just by selecting the right AudioRead node in the Audio dropdown. For more information, see Audio in Nuke.
5.   To check the final result in correct video colorspace and pixel aspect ratio, preview your footage on an external broadcast video monitor. See Previewing on an External Broadcast Video Monitor.
6.   When you’re happy with your preview results, you can render out your clip. To do this, you need to connect at least one Write node to your clip, and then set the render properties in the properties panel. You can specify your render format in the filename field, and use the frame control to offset your frame numbers if necessary. For more information, see Output (Write) Nodes.
7.   If you have more than one Write node connected to your node tree, you can render out all of them, or select the ones you want to render. You can then click Render > Render all or Render selected in the menu bar to start the renders. For more information, see Output (Write) Nodes.