Getting Started with Nuke - Nuke 101: Professional Compositing and Visual Effects - page 5

• Dope Sheet is a timeline representation of your clips and keyframes.
• Nodes Toolbar contains all the different nodes one can use to drive Nuke. These
are split into several sections or toolboxes represented by little icons.
• Node Graph or DAG. The process of building the process tree happens here.
• Properties Bin contains sliders and knobs to control your various nodes.
• ProgressBar is the window that tells you how long to wait for a process to finish,
be it a render, a tracking process, or anything that takes a significant amount of
time. This panel pops up whenever it's needed, but you can dock it in a pane,
which some find convenient.
• Script Editor is a text window where you can write Python scripts to automate
various features of Nuke.
• New Viewer opens a new viewer where you can view, compare, and analyze your
images.
Using the Content menu, you can change the interface to fit the specific needs and prefer-
ences of different users.
The menu bar
The menu bar at the very top of the Nuke interface holds more functionality. Here's an
explanation of the various menus ( FIGURE 1.3 ) .
Figure 1.3. The menu bar (on Mac OS X).
• File containscommandsfordiskoperations,includingloading,saving,andimport-
ing projects—but not images.
• Edit contains editing functions, preferences, and project settings.
• Layout facilitates restoring and saving layouts.
• Viewer helps in adding and connecting viewers.
• Render is used to launch a render as well as various other related commands.
• Help contains access to a list of hot keys, user documentation, training resources,
tutorial files, and Nuke-related email lists.
Using the Content menu, you can customize the user interface. You can then use the Lay-
out menu to save and retrieve the layout configuration.