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Creating Flipbook Previews

On the Viewer window, the timeline buttons let you play the project, but if you pay attention to the frames-per-second (FPS) field at the top of the Viewer window, you may notice that Nuke doesn’t provide real-time playback. This is because Nuke renders on-the-fly to display images in the Viewer. It’s fast, but also limited by the amount of memory and computer-processing power available to you.

The Flipbook feature provides better real-time preview, because it is prerendered for the FrameCycler viewer, included with Nuke. Keep in mind that the Flipbook feature renders a preview that matches the active resolution; if you’re in proxy mode, for example, that’s the resolution you’ll get in the flipbook.

NOTE: The Flipbook feature renders temporary files in the directory you specified for “disk cache” under Nuke > Preferences. You’ll also find an option there that allows you to limit the amount of disk space the flipbook feature uses.

To Generate a Flipbook

Select the Over node at the bottom of your node tree.

From the menu bar, choose Render > Flipbook selected.

Enter 1-28 as the number of frames to preview and click OK.

When the flipbook is ready to view, a copy of the FrameCycler window appears. Click the Play button to view the results.

Close the FrameCycler window to return to your project.