The Foundry Nuke Studio

About The Foundry Nuke Studio

Nuke is the compositor that finished shots go through when the shot has to survive a cinema screen. It is node based rather than layer based, which means the graph shows exactly what happens to the image and in what order, and any branch can be viewed at any point. On a complex shot with dozens of elements that transparency is not a preference, it is the only way the work stays debuggable.

The image pipeline is float linear throughout with proper colour management, so nothing clips or rounds on the way through. Deep compositing carries per-sample depth data so holdouts between elements resolve without hand drawn mattes, and the 3D system brings geometry, cameras and projections into the same graph rather than into a separate application.

This build carries the whole feature set. The NukeX tools add the camera tracker, lens distortion, planar tracking, denoise, depth generation and the particle system. The Studio layer adds a conform timeline, so plates are cut, versioned and reviewed inside the same session that composites them, and shots hand back and forth between the timeline and the node graph without an export.

Everything is scriptable. The Python API reaches the whole node graph, gizmos package a subgraph into a reusable node with its own controls, and expressions link parameters across the graph. A studio setup written once travels between machines as a plugin path, which is how facilities keep hundreds of shots consistent.

What is included in this build

• Node based compositing with float linear processing and full colour management
• Deep compositing with per-sample depth for holdouts without hand drawn mattes
• 3D system with geometry, cameras, projections and scanline rendering in the graph
• Camera tracker, lens distortion, planar tracking and denoise from the NukeX tool set
• Conform timeline for cutting, versioning and reviewing plates in the same session
• Particle system and depth generation tools included
• Python API reaching the entire node graph, with gizmos packaging reusable subgraphs
• Render farm friendly command line rendering of comp scripts

Changed in version 17.0v4

• Faster graph evaluation on scripts with very deep node trees
• Improved camera tracker solve on shots with heavy motion blur
• Timeline conform handling additional edit list variants
• Colour management configuration updated to the current standard set
• Reduced memory use on deep compositing workloads

Installation walkthrough

These steps assume a clean machine. If a previous release of the same application is present, deal with that first, since an overlapping install is the most common cause of a setup that stops halfway.

1. Install the current graphics driver from the GPU vendor before starting.
2. Extract the archive to a short path on a fast drive.
3. Run setup as administrator and accept the bundled runtime components.
4. Set the plugin and script paths in the environment before first launch if a house setup exists.
5. Point the disk cache at a fast internal drive rather than the system volume.

System requirements and file details

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