All language subtitles for 5. Using Frame Masking

Let's wrap up this module by going over some of the rest of the

buttons at the top of the Viewer interface.

Most of these buttons are used to provide you with

something called Frame Masking.

Frame Masking is when you need to quarantine off a

part of the shot you're working on, and the reason for doing this varies.

You may need to provide your client with a specific aspect ratio,

or one reason that comes up almost every week in a production environment

is making sure things are in title and action safe.

This button gives you a way of viewing what in your shot is

in action safe and what is in title safe.

If you're not familiar with these terms and you start to work with NUKE a lot,

you'll become familiar with them pretty quickly.

Some televisions project their image past the framing or

bezel surrounding their viewable screens.

Most old tube TVs overshoot their screens by quite a bit,

so we use our action safe guides to show us what will be

guaranteed to be viewable on all television sets.

You generally want to keep all plot specific action within this safety zone

to make sure it gets read or easily seen by the viewer.

The next setting is title safe,

and I'll turn that on to show you that it's a little smaller than action safe,

and now I'll turn off action safe.

Because of the differences between all TVs out there,

we need to use title safe whenever we're printing text to the screen.

Generally, this happens for end credits,

lower third, sometimes called Chyrons, or for title screens themselves.

It's always best practice to make sure that you keep

all text within this boundary.

This other switch is just going to show us the format center of the screen,

it's just going to give us a little crosshairs to

indicate where the exact center is, it's pretty helpful sometimes,

and this one just shows us the border of our format or native resolution.

In this case, it's 1920x1280, so that's what's indicated by the red.

I'll turn those off, and we'll go to this next button.

Now this next button helps us track aspect ratios.

Different film formats have different ratios of height to width of the film.

That's why sometimes when you buy a widescreen movie and there are

black bars at the top and bottom of your TV,

it's because these movies are usually shown in a 16x9 ratio,

or in a 1.

85x1 ratio, or in CinemaScope, which is 2.

35x1.

So if I switch over to this blue constant and we go up here to this menu,

and I select 16x9 for example,

we have the options of seeing the 16x9 aspect ratio as guidelines seen here,

or as half opaque guidelines, or as fully opaque guidelines.

So you can see what's going to fall within the 16x9 safety zone.

This is the 1.

85:1 safety zone or CinemaScope safety zone.

I'm going to reset this view back to square and none,

and I'm going to view this image of earth again.

Now I'm going to do this to show you one last button.

This button is zebra striping.

Zebra striping is a technique used to show us what colors are in safe range.

Just like with title and action safe borders,

most TVs are only standardized to be able to project certain ranges of colors.

While this is quickly changing, right now,

some people out there still have TVs that rely on certain color ranges.

If colors get too bright,

they'll bleed out of your intended boundaries when

they're on the audience's screen.

So we use zebra striping to tell us if our color ranges are in a safe,

manageable range.

So if I go up here, and I select Exposure,

and turn this on,

and then I go to this Color Correct Node's properties and I boost the gain up,

you'll see our white value start to get a new

texture that looks like zebra stripes.

This is zebra striping, and it means that our values are too bright.

This is a great tool for double-checking yourself from time to time when

dealing with color correction or bright overexposed images.

You always want to stay within bounds so your audience can

enjoy the hard work the way you intended it.

So if I bring this gain back down to one,

you'll see that our values come back into range and everything's safe.

I'm just going to turn that off, and now we're back to normal.

In the next module, we'll take a look at the timeline and playback controls,

and I'll show you a pretty cool tool called Flipbooking.