Original subtitles

In this module, we'll take a look at the last piece of the interface.

Even though it's the simplest, it's also one of the most important.

It's the timeline, and it transports us around our animation as we work.

The timeline is located at the bottom of the Viewer panel,

and it allows us to adjust the playback settings,

including the frame range, selecting the playback mode,

and locking the view panel's playback range.

This little orange triangle is the frame indicator.

You can drag the frame indicator along the timeline to quickly

skip to the specific frame you want to view.

So if you left-mouse button click on this little guy,

you can just grab him and drag him to any frame you want along the animation,

and jump right to that frame.

Now when you do that,

the current frame will appear in the middle of the timeline here.

You can use this frame indicator in the middle of the timeline to

enter a specific frame you want to jump to as well.

So if I go down here, I can just put frame 50 in here,

and we'll jump ahead to frame 50.

This frame indicator also takes simple equations,

so if you have to jump ahead 25 frames or jump back

25 frames from your current frame,

you can just type in +25 or -25 into this field and

it'll do the operation for you.

So if I hit -25, it's going to jump that cursor back 25 frames on the timeline.

So to go back to where we were, I'll do +25,

and that's about as simple as it gets.

If you put an equation in here like 10+20,

it won't do that,

it'll only be able to handle moving the cursor negative frames or

positive frames in either the left or the right direction.

I should take a second to point out too that NUKE by default is

automatically adjusting the timeline of your Viewer panel to show the

frame range defined by your project settings.

So if you see down here that the frame range is between frames 1 and frames 200,

it's drawing that information from your project settings.

So at any time if you're in the Node Graph,

you can hit the S button and it'll bring up the properties for

your entire workflow in the Properties panel.

And down here we have a frame range that's 1-200,

so if I put 300 in here,

NUKE is going to automatically adjust the timeline to

be a frame range of 1-300 instead.

If there's a specific piece of animation we want to zoom in on,

you can just right-click down here in the timeline and drag a cursor out,

and NUKE will automatically zoom into the frame range you have defined.

If you want to zoom in even further,

you can just grab it and zoom in even further.

Now if you want to get back out to the global view again,

you should know that there's a dropdown menu right

here where this word Visible is.

If I click on this, it gives me a couple of options: Global,

Input, In/Out, and Visible.

So right now it's just showing us the visible range,

and that's the user defined range that we just zoomed in on.

If I go back to Global,

it's going to reset the slider back to the global settings,

and like we just said, the global settings are defined by the Properties menu.

Likewise, we can set this to the Input range.

So if I select Input, it's going to reset the timeline to be the Input range,

and that is basically, if you have a Read Node in your scene,

or if you have a Read Node selected,

it's going to adjust the timeline to be the amount of time

that's contained inside that Read Node.

And that of course brings us to the next option, which is In/Out.

So if I select In/Out,

basically it's going to give us a frame range that's

defined by our ins and our outs, and that brings me to these two buttons here.

This button is an in button and this button is your out button,

and we can define what frames we want to be our in and out

buttons by selecting a frame and then hitting that in

button to drop the in marker.

And then if I go to frame 150, for example,

I can hit the out button and clip it in the out range.

So if we skip back to the Global range,

you'll see that these orange bars have appeared where

we've defined our in and our out frames,

our in frame being 50 and our out frame being 150.

So when you've sequestered a frame range like that,

and you use this VCR buttons at the bottom of the Display panel,

your Viewer is going to be working within that specified range.

So if I hit Play, and I do playback within this range,

it's going to stop at my out just like that,

and repeat where my in is.

So right now we've just basically defined a temporary

frame range in which we're working.

This becomes important in production because there might be a

specific set of frames that you want to look at over,

and over, and over again to see glitching animation,

and if you can just tell NUKE to calculate those specific frames,

you can play them back in a loop like this,

and modify your work, and play them back,

and modify your work until you get the animation

the way that you want it to look.

So I'll stop this and I'll point out this little button

here that's now been highlighted red.

This little button is just to tell us that we've

locked the Viewer in a playback range.

So whenever we define an in and out and lock our Viewer within a playback range,

this button's going to highlight, and we can just turn that off by clicking here,

and now our playback will go beyond the range that we previously specified.

And you can always just bring that back by clicking on this

and going back to the in and out mode.

I'd also like to point out this menu here,

which lets you toggle between frames and timecode.

So if you're more comfortable working in timecode,

you can just set this option to timecode,

and you'll get your timecode on the timeline instead of frames.

If you're more comfortable with frames, just stick to the frame range.

We also have these incrementing buttons down here,

and they just let you skip forward and backward in the timeline

by however many frames you want to define.

So if I'm on frame 150 and this is set to 10,

this is just going to bounce between intervals of 10 on the timeline.

I can set this to 50 frames and it's going to bounce by

increments of 50 on the timeline.

So now let's take a look at flipbooking,

and flipbooking just lets us view a range of frames in real time.

So it's going to render out those frames that we want to

take a look at and it's going to play them back as a movie

file that plays it real time.

When we hit Play on the timeline down here,

you can see that this is far from real time because it's

calculating the frames as it goes, and as your comps get much bigger than this,

that speed will slow down as well.

So if we want to see these frames played back at 24 frames per second,

which is a standard for animation, we can flipbook things,

and we do that by clicking on this button here,

and this will bring up your flipbook settings.

So if we take a look at these flipbook settings,

this is going to be our default flipbook,

we're going to be rendering out Viewer1,

which corresponds to our Viewer1 right here.

You can click this button on or click this button

off to use a Region Of Interest, which we talked about in a previous clip.

So if we want to,

we can render out a single range of pixels that we define with the ROI button.

This is our frame range, so if we want to see between frames 50 and frames 100,

we select that there.

Rendering the background's useful sometimes,

that just means that it's going to run this flipbooking

process in the background as a separate thread.

You can check that on or not, that's up to you.

If you have an Audio Node in your scene,

like we've looked at in previous clips and previous modules,

you can select it here.

This current comp doesn't have one so we'll just say None,

and I'm going to hit OK here, and now it's going to render those frames.

So I'm going to come back in a second when this render's done and

we're going to take a look at the flipbook.

We're back, and we have our flipbook, and if you take a look at it,

it's playing back this CameraShake Node in real time.

So this is what our animation currently looks like.

So that's basically all you have to know about the Viewer.

In the next module, we'll take a look at doing a real live NUKE comp.

We're going to take this image of earth and we're

going to put it together for you.

We're going to put it on top of a star field,

and we're going to use some nodes that we haven't seen before,

and just put together a general comp so you can see

what a workflow looks like in NUKE, and get started.