Nuke Vs Shake

[dvaley]

Hi,

For someone who is looking to move from Shake4.1 to Nuke 4.5 and beyond, I
would like to ask all the Nuke guru's here their unbiased comments on following

1. Nuke vs Shake Paint

2. Nuke Keyer vs Shake

3. Nuke Roto vs Shake

4. Nuke Caching vs Shake

5. Nuke Render Speed vs Shake.

This breif comparison would help all those sitting on the fence with Shake4.1 being EOL.

Rgds
Vivek Malhotra

[user_deleted]

1. Nuke vs Shake Paint
   Nuke's paint tool is close to useless. If you know it's quirks you will be able to do simple clone stamp stuff or paint wholes in mattes but all in all I'd say it should be considered non-existing.

2. Nuke Keyer vs Shake
   Nuke's got Primatte and IBK which is basically like an imaged based Keylight but a mystery to figure out due to the lack of proper docs. It does come with an IBK_tutorial but it is absolutely non-intuitive to get your head around it though it's a powerful tool once you get it (I'm not saying I did )
   Primatte is Primatte, pretty straight forward.

3. Nuke Roto vs Shake
   almost a matter of taste. Nuke's Bezier node might appear more basic than Shake's RotoShape on first sight but is stable, fast and reliable and pretty much all you need in production. If you want more than one shape you will have to use one node each which I personally don't mind too much (you can always group them if you get annoyed).
   Soft edges, drag&drop to copy animation data to CVs, hotkeys for tweaking/fine tuning, global translation to offset all CVs, etc. all works well in Nuke without display problems (on Shake I used to experience a lot of open GL flickering when dealing with RotoShapes, might be fixed in 4.1 not sure).
   What I like about Nuke's Bezier is that it can draw directly into a channel so you don't have to copy it into the stream (you can optionally clear the channel first or simply add to it). Seems more streamlined to me.
   You have four different types of falloff to control the soft edges and can add a global "softness" on top of the CV's local soft edge.

4. Nuke Caching vs Shake
   Nuke caching works. period.

5. Nuke Render Speed vs Shake.
   Nuke is way smarter about what pixels to update in the viewer when working interactively.
   Drawing viewer DODs on the fly is nice and easy, you can click into the viewer to tell Nuke which scanline to start updating first and it will only render the pixels that are actually seen on your monitor depending on zoom level and size of the viewer (which acts like an auto DOD). Oh, and you can keep working while it renders/updates the viewer. All this makes it a lot more interactive than Shake.
   As for the actual render speed (i.e. full frame render to disk) I never made any benchmarks but always had the feeling Nuke is a lot faster as well.

[goee]

1. Both terrible, but Shake one is a little better. Dustbusting in Nuke is easier.

2. Nuke. More options, better Primatte implementation and channels make things way easier and cleaner to deal with.

3. Nuke specially if you take into account channels

4. Nuke by far. FrameCycler is great and caching works far better.

5. I think Nuke is a bit faster

Overall Nuke is far superior in terms of workflow, technology, scripting and customization. Macros (gizmos) in Nuke rule, all float, kick ass OpenEXR support, real 3D environment among other features.

And let's not forget to mention Color correction features which is something that Nuke is great at it.