Contact Sheet in Nuke Studio

This section covers how Contact Sheet works in Nuke Studio and Hiero.

The Contact Sheet Viewer enables you to review and compare shots in the Studio environment.

Contact Sheet allows you to quickly load multiple shots, but from a sequence, for artistic, comparison and review purposes.

Contact Sheet is designed to offer a fluid and dynamic user experience, with the ability to add and filter shots to the Viewer.

Contact Sheet Overview

In the example below we have a sequence open and some shots have been selected to be displayed in the Contact Sheet. The Timeline viewer and the Contact Sheet Viewer can be seen side by side.

The Contact Sheet buttons and menu items are shown below:

• Send To Contact Sheet - The Send To Contact Sheet button is used to make the current sequence eligible to populate the Contact Sheet.

The button has two states:

• Inactive (gray) - The sequence is not populating the Contact Sheet

• Active (highlighted) - The sequence is being used by the Contact Sheet

Note:  Once the button is active, you cannot disable it unless another sequence is loaded and sent to the Contact Sheet or the Contact Sheet Viewer is closed. More on this in the Using Contact Sheet section.

• Pick Mode - The Pick Mode button lets you manually choose shots in the sequence to be displayed in the Contact Sheer Viewer. The Pick Mode button will only be available once the Send To Contact Sheet button is active for the sequence.

The button has two states:

• Inactive (gray) - Normal hard selection and editorial tools are active in the Edit Tool bar. Any shots selected will obey the usual hard selection methodology and will not be displayed in the Contact Sheet Viewer

• Active (highlighted) - This state is used to explicitly select shots in the sequence that you want displayed in the Contact Sheet viewer. Any selections made in Pick Mode are only for Contact Sheet use and will not interfere or affect any current hard selections made in the sequence before entering Pick Mode

• Tag Filter/Pick Toggle & Tag Filter Drop Down - This button enables you to switch between displaying either manually selected shots from the sequence in the Contact Sheet Viewer, or toggling to display shots that are using tag filtering. This functionality is provided by the left hand Tag icon. The right hand side drop down icon, when pressed, will show a list of all tags currently being used in the sequence and check boxes to allow for boolean operations.

The left hand Tag button has two states:

• Inactive (gray) - This state will display any shots that have been selected via the Pick Mode button

• Active (highlighted) - This state will toggle the Contact Sheet Viewer to display shots that match the criteria set in the Tag Filter Drop Down menu

• Pages - This button works in conjunction with the Max Row Count and Max Column Count options found in the Contact Sheet Settings. This is set by default to a 5x5 grid able to accommodate 25 shots per page. If a selection of more than 25 shots are selected to be displayed in the Contact Sheet in this particular example, then any shot count above 25 will be automatically added to a second page until this is populated. The page count will then increment to display how many pages the selected are contained in and up and down arrows to be able to navigate between the pages. You can also use the scroll functionality found in other number fields in Nuke, to also navigate the additional pages.

• Soft FX Bypass - The Soft FX Bypass button will bypass only any track based Soft effects to enable the user to quickly disable these effects without having to modify the sequence. This will only affect the Contact Sheet Viewer. Viewing the sequence in the Timeline Viewer will still show any track based Soft effects.

The button has two states:

• Inactive (gray) - This state will display any track based Soft effects in the sequence being used to populate the Contact Sheet

• Active (highlighted) - This state will bypass any track based Soft effects in the sequence being used to populate the Contact Sheet

• Reset - The Reset button will quickly clear the Contact Sheet of all clips and reset to its initial state. Pushing this button will clear all active clips in the Pick Mode and as well as all tag filter states. The function is not undoable.

• Contact Sheet Settings - The Contact Sheet Settings drop down displays options that affect the way the Contact Sheet functions.

Currently this includes:

• Contact Sheet Output Resolution - This gives the user the ability to customize the Contact Sheet resolution. Modifying this can affect the quality of the images currently being displayed. You can also set custom resolutions that can be useful when used in conjunction with the Max Row and Column count options.

• Max Row & Column Count - These two values allow you to customize the layout of the Contact Sheet. Together the two values will effectively set a maximum amount of shots that can be displayed per page, i.e the default of 5 rows and 5 columns allows for a Contact Sheet of 25 shots per page.

Using Contact Sheet

To learn how to use the Contact Sheet, see the following pages:

• Using Contact Sheet: Manual Pick Mode

• Using Contact Sheet: Playback

• Using Contact Sheet: Tag Filtering

• Using Contact Sheet: Workflows & Soft Effects

• Using Contact Sheet: Preferences

Additional Considerations

Performance

The performance of the Contact Sheet feature in Studio 16.0v1 will depend on the specification of the host computer that Studio is being run on, storage and network performance as well as the format of media sources being used.

Currently, there is no specific Contact Sheet Disk Caching so real time playback will depend on the amount of shots being displayed in conjunction with the available RAM cache allocated in preferences.

Integration with Existing Features

Contact Sheet is compatible with existing timeline Soft effects, although multiple stacked Soft Effects and BlinkScript effects may impact responsiveness.

Annotations are not currently displayed and it is not possible to annotate directly onto the Contact Sheet Viewer.

A/B compare modes are not supported in the Contact Sheet Viewer.