Touring the Interface with a Basic Composite - Nuke 101: Professional Compositing and Visual Effects - page 78

Note
Ifyou'reusingthePLEversionofNuke,youwillnotbeabletopreviewyour
work using Framecycler, as it's a blocked feature under the PLE license. If
that's the case, simply click Play in the Viewer and wait for it to cache. This
might not result in perfect playback.
1. Select Merge1 and press Alt/Option-F to render a flipbook of the selected node
and load it into Framecycler.
2. In the Flipbook panel that displays, leave the frame range at 1-100 and press OK.
AProgressBardisplaystoshowyoutheframecountastheyarerendered.Thisis
slightly different than the way you used Framecycler in Chapter 1 and previously
inthischapter,asyouarenowactuallyprocessingatreeandnotjustloadingRead
or Write nodes into Framecycler.
What's happening now is the tree is being rendered into a temp directory, and
thosetempframeswillgetloadedintoFramecycler.WhenyoucloseFramecycler,
those frames will be deleted.
3. When Framecycler loads, press the Spacebar to play the clip.
Notice the dark flash that occurred during the playback. It starts at frame 42. You
willneedtomakethedollmimicthislightfluctuation.Sofarallthevaluesyouset
for various properties were constant values—not changing from frame to frame.
Now you need to change those values over time. For that purpose you have key-
frames.
4. If Framecycler is still open, close it.
Creating Animation with Keyframes
Keyframes specify that you want animation. To do this, the property needs to change its
value over time. So if you want your image to have a Blur value of 20 to begin with and
then, at frame 10, to have a value of 10, you need to specify these two pieces of informa-
tion: a value for frame 1 and a value for frame 10, and the application will interpolate the
in-between values.
In Nuke, practically every property can be keyframed. You are going to create another
Grade node and use that to change the brightness of the doll branch to match the changes
to the lighting in the background.
1. In the Viewer, go to frame 42 by clicking the Timebar ( FIGURE 2.50 ).