What does a digital compositor do?
Compositors create the final image of a frame, shot or sequence. They take different digital elements; like the animations, background plates, graphics and special effects (SFX) and put them together to make a believable picture.
General Pipeline of a film/movie
Three routes in an established production company
- Technical Artist
- CG Generalist
- Compositor
Digital Compositor progression:
- Roto
- Prep
- Junior comp
- Mid comp
- Senior comp
- Lead comp/department head
- 2D sup
- VFX sup
Software for Compositing
After Effects
- Layer based compositing
- 8/16-bit colour, for broadcasting use
- Most of the time, not computationally heavy
- popular with motion graphics
- Unstable performances with large data files, and other colour spaces other than sRGB
- Missing features for digital compositing
Davinci Resolve
- Node-based
- better colour management
- works well with heavy files
- Free
- Comp and grading in the same software
Nuke
- Supports USD (universal scene description)
- Customizable
- Comes in different types
- NukeX
- Nuke Student
- Nuke Non-Commerical
- Nuke Indie
Nuke
More information is available in the documents in the week 3 folder.
What was went through:
- UI navigation
- Toolbar
- Node graph
- Properties
- Viewer
- Some basic shortcuts
- Nuke script format, open projects, save projects
- Workspaces
- Node groups
- Commonly used nodes
Feedback
Comments: Pay more attention to telling the story. Need more direction.
Next week’s homework:
Practice and get comfortable with the software
Next class: Rotoscoping
Reflections
Today’s class is still covering a bit of theory. Gonzalo covered in detail what the job of a compositor entails and where compositing is positioned in the pipeline. He also covered the general progression of a digital compositor. We then moved on to talk about the differences between the different general compositing software in the different industries.
The later part of the class, we finally proceed to open nuke. Gonzalo very patiently introduced us to node based compositing with Nuke. He also covered some common nodes that we will be using often in our journey. He assured us that it is alright to not understand everything that he covered as it might be overwhelming at first, but eventually we will get it. I really like the pacing of his class as it was not too fast nor it was slow. I look forward to more Nuke classes as it seems interesting.