All language subtitles for 4. Using Proxy Modes and the Region of Interest (ROI) Tool

Now that we've entered the realm of comparing footage

from different parts of our comp, it's time to take a look at proxies.

So what is a proxy?

Well a proxy is a version of our comp that's set to a lower resolution.

Setting our Viewer to a lower resolution is going to cause us to

be viewing the image at a much lesser quality.

So why would we even do that?

Well, some of the comps we've been looking at aren't very complicated right now.

However, in production,

your composites will quickly grow to contain hundreds of nodes.

Each node we add to our comp adds calculation time to view our image.

So if the calculations are very costly and are taking a great deal of time,

we can use proxies to get quicker feedback.

Since the image will be a lower quality resolution,

there's less time to calculate and feedback speeds up.

So if we take a look at the current Viewer,

we'll see a dropdown menu here that reads 1:1.

Let's drop that down to 1:2 to half our resolution.

You see that there's not much change, but if we switch this to 1:16,

you see everything start to pixelate, or even 1:32,

you see the pixilation gets even worse.

Now we're not actually modifying the resolution of the

image when we're using these proxies.

We're just creating a different Viewer that's down-resing the

proxies to make it faster for us to get feedback.

So right now this 1920x1280 image is currently at a resolution of 60x40 pixels,

so that's pretty low, and if we set that to 1:8 you see it's 240x160.

So you get a number of different choices of resolutions that you can pick,

and it's just helpful that if you're working with a

plate that's abnormally large,

you can set those proxies to be a much smaller resolution,

and work with them much faster.

I should also point out that the Viewer panel is tied to

the node it represents in our Node Graph,

they're essentially the same thing.

So if we add a Viewer Node to our comp by hitting the Tab button,

and by typing Viewer and hitting Enter, and connecting this up to the same node,

you notice that up here we get two different tabs.

We have Viewer1 and Viewer2, and these correspond with Viewer1 and Viewer2,

and you'll notice that Viewer2 set itself to a resolution of 1:1,

so there's no proxy there.

So if we switch back to this tab, you'll see that holds the proxy view.

So we can set one Viewer to a low proxy and set the other to a 1:1.

This way we can use one Viewer to get quick feedback

and playback of our animation,

but we have another Viewer so that we can see what

the full resolution looks like.

So I'm just going to go ahead now and delete this and set this back to 1:1.

Now another way to speed up your comp when its calculations

have become a burden on you is to use the ROI.

ROI stands for Region Of Interest, and it's represented by this button here.

If we click this button on,

you'll notice this rectangular bracket pops up in our Viewer,

and you can grab the handles on either side and change the shape of this,

and you can grab the center point and move it to

anywhere you want on the screen,

and this box represents your ROI or Region Of Interest.

Now,

what Region Of Interest means is NUKE will only calculate pixels

that fall within the border of this square,

or whatever boundary you decide to set up.

So if we go to this Color Correct Node, for example,

and hit one to show it in the Viewer,

it's only updating those pixels within our region of interest,

and you can still move this if you need to see other pixels,

but this is a way that you can selectively decide what NUKE will show you.

So if we just pan around here,

it's updating all those pixels based on where we're moving this box.

So again, I can switch this back to the previous Color Correct Node,

and it's only updating pixels within this box,

and I can make this box really tiny,

and show you it's only updating those pixels.

So that's a pretty easy way to see a specific area of your comp if you're

working on a shadow or you're working on a specular highlight somewhere in the

image and you only want to see this area down here,

and work with that area,

you can just sequester those pixels and NUKE will only update those pixels,

which makes the calculations very fast because it's only

calculating the pixels inside this box.

And to get rid of that you just click on this Region Of Interest button again,

and it will go back to normal.