What Should The Foundry Do?
Monday, March 12, 2007 at 2:22PM Speculation is easy, opinions are interesting. Some thoughts on what The Foundry should do with Nuke.
The facelift: Redesign the UI. Nuke feels cramped on one display. Lose the floating window model and adopt panes like Shake and Fusion have. Steal a color palette from a website you like.
The if-you-can't-beat-'em: Provide an option to view nodes' output without manually linking them to a viewer node.
The edumacation: Publish some video tutorials and release demos for all platforms.
The big, wide world: Outside the sanctum sanctorum of DD, little things like the ability to use Quicktime movies matter a lot.
The no-brainer: Integrate Furnace technology like crazy. The not-so-obvious adjunct: Don't raise the price in the process.
The clincher: Lower the price (even just a little). You are still competing against Shake, and what you need most is to convert users who have already made a financial investment in other solutions.
The clincher part two: Continue to support Windows, Linux, and OS X. Nobody's gotten anywhere by only living on one of the three, and nobody else is on all three.
The hard part: All the cool kids have particles.
Reader Comments (12)
Hey Stu.. I wanted to address some of your thoughts from a DD Nuke user..
cramped display - Don't most comp packages need two monitors out of necessity? I find even Shake to be cramped on one monitor. I have two on my desk now, and Nuke and Shake run beautifully with the extra real estate!
view output - you can.. select your node and hit 1 through 0. You can have up to 10 node views per viewer.
education - yep, totally agree with you there. Needs documentation that's relevant.
QT - coming, it's coming!
Furnace - hells yeah.
Lower price - would love it. However, Nuke doesn't compete with Shake anymore. I thought it did, but Nuke runs faster and does more things. Sure, I miss some of shake's tools, but I've found the equavalent within Nuke!
Operating Systems - I'm sure it'll still stay on all three big OSes.
Great comment Aruna. I think there's real value in feedback about the future of the app from longtime users. There's also a very different but equally important value to the first impressions of people trying Nuke for the first time. I'd love to hear more from both types of folks!
Like they shoud do anything...
Added cost for OMF as it bombed elsewhere
Hey Stu.
First of all, great blog!
Second, and this question may be way off topic, but I figured these comments are more viewed, possibly by someone who knows the answer to my question:
When (plz be soon) is AE coming out with a version for OSX that's not PPL?
Obviously many of the ideas for The Foundry are are so applicable for After Effects also. Though I haven't heard anything solid about what's happening.
//Cart, Sweden
I can't comment too much on this, since I've never actually used Nuke to comp anything. I've opened it and dabbled around, and hated the interface, and the price tag guaranteed I was never going to be buying it for home use.
My hope would be that the price come down a bit, at least half. Doesn't that make sense? I'm not a business owner or salesman of any type, but it if it cost $2000 and they sold 10 copies, isn't that better than selling 1 or 2 copies at $5000? I know tons of people look at the price and then don't even bother trying it, since they know they won't be buying it. I feel the same way about Fusion (even after using it for months, and liking it). At work, I'm forced to use what the studio as a whole has adopted (or, in this case, created). At home, why would I choose a $5000 app when I could get the same thing (more or less) for 1/5 that, or in Shake's case, 1/10?
$5000 is enough for a DVRebel to make a whole movie or two!
I don't want to just rant on the price, since these programs are all amazing and the coders are fully deserving of whatever they're able to get. I just know I won't be buying a $5000 comping program for home. Especially one with floating windows. I know some people like floating windows, but I don't.
Cramped display - I've never had 2 displays anywhere I've ever worked, including CafeFX and R&H. 2 displays shouldn't be a neccessity to get the most out of a UI.
That said, I'll certainly always be watching Nuke, and may give it a try when I see something in it I might benefit from. Right now, there's nothing magical it does that can't be done in other programs. And who knows, if I end up working over at DD and get addicted to it, maybe my whole opinion will change.
I have checked nuke a year ago, but like Fusion I skipped it minutes later, the whole interface didn´t make any sense to me, it´s probably made for technicians, not artists - but that´s the sad case with most so-called creative softwares.
The only positive experience I´ve had in recent years was with Alias` Sketchbook, THOSE concepts ( and more ) would be what I´m dreaming to see in 3D and 2D creation softwares.
BTW Stu, your blog keeps rocking !!!
I find that nuke has some great tools for comping and colour correction, I do a lot of roto/paint/rig removal and nuke's tools severely lack in this area. One shape per node, linking tracking info is a pain, 2 controls for moving your bezier is great, but make them work together in 1 tab not 2, wastes time. Right click menu for the transform control, linking tracks, copy, paste, hide, unhide, etc.... I have been wasting so much time going back and forth from the viewer to the menu.
also, the warp tool, there needs to be better inplementation of copying and pasting animated beziers, or tracked beziers into the warp tool, I use this all the time in shake. I won't start on the paint tool since it looks like a bad open source project.
I don't mind if they don't work on th UI straight away, as long as all the tools are efficent and robust, not just the colour correcting tools.
Please dont take floating windows away from me ;-). There should be options. If you want them you should be able to use them. If you don`t there should be option for you (and control panel bin with its current interaction model does not seem to be that option). I like open philosophy of Nuke. I understand that newcomers might be confused a bit, but hey this is not Shake nor Fusion. There are different concepts at play. Even I had to learn. I think there is another area which needs to be improved. Import of 3D data, Cameras from 3D apps/Trackers, we had to write our own exporter for XSI which was fun, but sometimes you have lots of other things to do than learning about Tcl (which rocks) and 3D formats. This should be standard in todays apps. And Fusion have this quite nicely implemented.
Been using fusion for many years, and out of necessity (a huge 8k comp that fusion just couldn't hack) I was fortunate enough to have borrowed a friend's nuke workstation. I've been eying it from afar since it was released to the public, and finally being able to use it, I'm blown away.
Yes, it's lacking in a few areas, but I have other software to do heavy roto and paint work in until that stuff improves.
I agree with Castelis, DO NOT remove the floating windows...make them optionally dockable if need be, but don't remove them. True floating windows is what I've been hoping to have in fusion for years...and finally I feel freed up to place things where *I* want them.
As for the GUI, yes it's a little rough around the edges and could use some work, but only if they keep it simple and clean. I've seen a lot of apps that get a "facelift" for the sake of cool aesthetics, but as a result they become far less usable. More basic, more obvious...not fancier and certainly not "prettier" just for the sake of being prettier.
Love nuke, it's amazingly fast compared to fusion I think, the scanline renderer absolutely rocks.
Definitely needs more educational resources out there though.
Hey Stu,
Just came across this and well, you know, I always have $0.02
The floating windows- I am not 100% sure, but I think you lose the contextual undo if you make it all one window. Plus, my understanding is this is not a small undertaking, as the UI was reworked for 4.5 and this was deemed 'too difficult'.
Price- NUKE is priced right, and I don't say that because I came up with it. If you look at the competition, those with a future anyway, its priced where it should be- above Fusion (its faster and cooler) and below Toxic (because Autodesk is fooling itself). For a small company with a limited number of seats in the world, like both D2 software and the foundry, i think 5k is the right price. Shake is considered a competitor now, but I think that fades over time and then you've dropped your price unneccessarily. Facilities were switching at 5K with no foundry, and you have to believe the feature stuff, support, etc, is only going to get better.
QT implementation will get better. At least you hope...
Particles is actually easy. hit x and type particles, and you may get a completely unimplemented node (they may have removed it). but it was part of the new 3D system for 4.5, just not implemented.
Personally, I think all it will take is to 'pretty it up'. A slicker gui and a lot of people will suddenly want to learn it. And maybe a script to help people convert their individual passes to EXRs, and clean up some of the operators, like the channel copy nodes, so they are easier to figure out.
The first good thing the foundry did was get the crack out. That will help a lot.
by the way, I heard that Wyndcrest Holdings (owner of DD) also invested in the Foundry before doing this deal. If thats true, they sold it to themselves and you are still buying from DD, in a roundabout way.
Glad to hear that you guys ended up getting it, and I told....
:)
Great blog!
Thanks for chiming in Gary, your feedback is more than welcome.
Looks like that undocumented particles node is missing in 4.6. :(
I've come around on the floating windows thing—I see my artists using and loving them on their 2-monitor systems. I use the control panel bin on my laptop though.
Shake has a unified UI and can float any window. That would probably make everyone happy. If you want to stick with floating windows they need to size dynamically with the other windows at least. Also most houses only give you one monitor so the ui needs to work well on one monitor. In Shake and fusion (and AE) you are one keystroke away from blowing out all but the window you need to be viewing. That is a must.