The Nuke Personal Learning Edition is a special version of Nuke that you can run without a license. The Personal Learning Edition is meant for personal, educational, and other non-commercial use. It is aimed at students, industry professionals, and others interested in Nuke. It includes all the features of the commercial version of Nuke, offering you a chance to explore and learn the application fully while using it from the comfort of your own home.
The PLE is a fully functional version of Nuke, but, being aimed for non-commercial use only, it does differ from the commercial version in some aspects. Here are the main differences:
• Watermark. The PLE displays a watermark (shown below) on any images in the Viewer as well as images rendered out to files. This is to prevent the commercial use of the images.
• External data storage. All external data storage is encrypted in the PLE, including Nuke scripts (these are saved with the extension .nkple), gizmos (saved with the extension .gzple), and copying to the clipboard. Among other things, this means the PLE saves files in an encrypted format, unlike the commercial version of Nuke, which saves scripts unencrypted as plain text. The commercial version of Nuke cannot load files created with the PLE.
The PLE, however, can load scripts and gizmos created with the commercial version.
• Scripting. In PLE mode, Nuke restricts the amount of nodes that can be retrieved at a time by scripting. Functions such as nuke.allNodes() in Python return only the first 10 nodes available rather than all of them at once, and scripts written to iterate through the Node Graph are not able to retrieve any more nodes beyond a set point. The commercial version of Nuke can retrieve any and all nodes at any time as the command names would suggest.
• BlinkScript. The BlinkScript node is disabled in the PLE.
• WriteGeo. The WriteGeo node is disabled in the PLE.
• Primatte. The Primatte keyer node is disabled in the PLE.
• Ultimatte. The Ultimatte keyer node is disabled in the PLE.
• FrameCycler. FrameCycler is disabled in the PLE.
• Monitor output. There is no video monitor output support in the PLE.
• Plug-ins. Only plug-ins that are shipped with Nuke, such as OFlow, can be used in the PLE. OFX plug-ins (such as The Foundry's Furnace) and custom plug-ins compiled with the NDK can only be used in the commercial version of Nuke.
• Command line rendering. It is not possible to render a PLE script with -x from the command line.
In other respects, the PLE contains all the functionality of the commercial version of Nuke.