All language subtitles for 3. Manipulating Nodes

So we've taken a look at where we can go to get the nodes that we need

to start building a comp down in our Node Graph,

but I would like to take a second here to talk about the way

that these nodes get connected to each other.

So I'm going to go ahead and drop another Blur node into

our comp by hitting the Tab button, typing Blur,

selecting Blur,

and you'll notice that there are these little triangles on the Blur node,

and if you left- mouse button click the little triangle and drag it out,

it becomes an arrow, and this one in the side becomes an arrow too.

And I just wanted to take a minute to point out to you that this

arrow that appears at top by default is the input,

and that's easy to remember because the arrow is facing into the Blur.

So, anything that is connected to this arrow will feed into this Blur node.

So I can drag this over and release it on top of the Read node,

and now this Read node is going into this Blur node.

Likewise, this little triangle down here is the output,

and if I drag it out and I release it over a node,

this node down here, the Blur1, now becomes the output of this operation.

So, that's not necessarily what I want,

so I'm going to just grab the base of this arrow with the

left- mouse button and drag it back over the Read node and

release to reconnect these things up.

So it's pretty easy.

This is the input, and this is the output.

This little arrow over here is a mask,

and I don't want to get too ahead of myself,

but a mask is the area that will be affected by this node.

So, I can drop in a Roto node by hitting the Tab button and a Roto,

and a Roto is just a way of drawing a very specific mask on your image,

and so if I connect this mask input on the side,

this Roto shape becomes the mask by which the Blur will

affect everything that's inputted into it.

So you see up here in the Viewer,

the Blur is only occurring inside of the shape that we've drawn,

and you can move this and you see that the shape is affecting the Blur.

Now that is a whole subject onto itself,

so, don't worry about it for right now,

I just wanted you to know that there is this arrow called the Mask Arrow

that is hanging out here on the right side of some nodes,

and so I just wanted you to know what it was.

I wanted to also take a quick second to go over how I've been

selecting and moving these nodes around.

If you left-mouse button click on any of these nodes,

you can just drag them around inside this canvas.

You can just drag them around inside this canvas.

You can also marquee select by holding down the left-mouse button,

and dragging and selecting any of the nodes that you want,

and once they're highlighted,

you can just click again and move them around wherever you want them to go.

A fun feature that I like to use a lot is if you have the Ctrl

button and the Shift button on the keyboard down,

and you click on a node, it will select everything upstream from that node.

That's very helpful if you've got a comp tree with 30 or 50 nodes in it.

Another thing I find really helpful is if I marquee select all of these,

and I right-click anywhere in this Node Graph,

in this Edit menu there is a selection called Invert Selection,

and that will give me all of the nodes in the tree that I don't have selected,

and that's really helpful to be able to isolate things that I want to move,

or things that I want to manipulate that I wouldn't otherwise be able to grab.

You've probably already noticed that it can get quite confusing if you've

got a lot of nodes that are in your comp of the same name.

If you've got four or five Blur nodes and they're called Blur1,

Blur2, Blur3, it's hard to keep track of them,

and I like to rename these nodes quite often,

just to let the next artist that's picking up my comp

know what these nodes are doing.

So in the Properties menu over here,

we see all of the properties for the nodes themselves.

I'm going to go ahead and clear out this menu by clicking all of

these X boxes to get rid of all of the properties,

and let's say for example, we want to rename this Blur1 node right here.

I'm going to double-click on that node,

it's going to bring the Properties up in the Properties menu,

and I'm going to click on this Node tab here.

Now, up in this box at the top is where the name of the node exists.

So I can rename this to something like HeavyEarthBlur,

and hit Enter,

and you'll see that the name of the node down here

has changed to HeavyEarthBlur.

Now you'll notice to that that name kind of went

outside of the bounds of the node, so to be clean,

you might want to go in here and just delete the word Heavy,

and call it EarthBlur, and you see that the node is called EarthBlur,

but you still want to tell people that this blur at this

particular time should be very heavy-handed,

the way that we have right here.

And to do that,

you can just type that note in the label box: This should be a heavy blur,

and the note will appear down here under the node for everybody to see.

I don't always use the label, but it's a good practice.

I do very often change the names of the nodes so that

people know what's going on inside my comp.

So we can, for example, go down here again into the ColorCorrect node,

I'm going to hit one so that we can see what's

going on in the ColorCorrect node,

I'm going to double-click on the ColorCorrect node,

over here I'm going to bring the saturation all the way down so

this image turns into a black and white image,

and up here I will just delete this.

I'm going to say CC so that everybody knows that's a ColorCorrect node,

I'm going to put an underscore in here, and I'm going to say,

Desaturate,

so that everybody knows that this is a ColorCorrect node

down here that is desaturating the image.

Another really important,

really useful operation to know about nodes is the Disable function.

If I have one of these nodes selected and I hit D on the keyboard,

it will turn on and off that operation that I have selected.

And you'll see in the Viewport, this is without the blur,

this is with the blur, this is without the desaturate,

this is with the desaturate.

You can marquee select these and hit D,

and turn them both on and off at the same time,

but this is really super useful when you're working with a comp to

see what a specific node is doing or not doing,

if you want to AB the difference between the node

being on and the node being off.

I'd like to cap off this lesson by showing you guys something that I think

is one of the coolest features about NUKE and its nodes,

and that is that you can copy and paste any of these

nodes into a text editor or an email, and they paste in as plain text.

So if I had all of these nodes selected and I hit

Ctrl+C on the keyboard to copy them, and I bring in Notepad,

and I hit Ctrl+V to paste them, you'll see right here,

this is the entire comp tree, just as it exists in plain text.

So if I wanted to email this to a friend that needed

my exact value on this Blur node, I could just send him this portion of the text,

or I could send him the whole comp tree,

and so I can select this portion two of the comp tree,

hit Ctrl+C to just copy the text, and go back to NUKE,

and if I'm down here in the Node Graph and I hit Ctrl+V,

it will paste that Blur node back into NUKE.

And I can connect it up, and it's the same one that we're seeing down here,

and it's the same one that we're seeing down here.

I'm switching between these and it's exactly identical.

So if you've got a node that has values that you want to keep,

and you're documenting them or you're sending them to a friend,

hey, I've color corrected this thing, it's red,

and you want to send him the exact same values,

you can just copy and paste these nodes into an email or into a text document,

and then copy them back into NUKE, and it's really powerful and really helpful.

So I hope you get a lot of use out of that.