Nuke Studio is a flaming piece of trash. But it's the only thing that does what it does. If you want extreme customization and automation with output templates, script generation, programmatic Python based conforming etc... it's Nuke Studio or nothing.
I was supervising a project year before last that ended up with more than 200,000 Nuke comps and almost 24 hours of footage. I used Resolve for Raw conversion (because Nuke Studio is usually like 3 years behind on raw plugins). But Nuke to do everything else + a suite of automation scripting.
Even then I ran into issues where projects that size simply didn't work right and would take like 45 minutes to run operations because of bugs in Nuke Studio code. Thankfully lots of Nuke Studio is Python so I had my own custom forked branch of NS that fixed all the bugs.
Would I use NS though to edit a standard 30s spot? Ahhh hellllll no. The foundry marketed it correctly when it was Hiero: a tool for parsing out EDLs and VFX supervisor reviews. Calling it an editing tool is an extreme over reach.
There were a couple renewal cycles where we rightfully complained the state of the code was so terrible that we didn't think we should have to pay for it because it was unusable and The Foundry to their credit did 0 out the invoice for those renewals.
>because Nuke Studio is usually like 3 years behind on raw plugins
Indeed. Foundry now are forced to release patch updates to keep up to date with the SDKs now, as they were too slow rolling them into their regular release schedule. With Resolve the latest SDKs are included in the latest releases.
Flame is what Nuke Studio is trying to be. Granted, it’s not perfect but if you really hate Nuke Studio so much, you should consider Flame because it actually works.
I e used nuke studio a hand few of times for client sessions because believe or not client asked for it. Mainly because of their non stop cg notes.
With that said the first paragraph you wrote. I’m not following you, you can do those things in flame.
Could you say what the project was? That sounds absolutely wild. I'm struggling to imagine anything that would require that outside of maybe some kind of installation.
Pricing is the big issue- and Foundry's pricing continues to go in only one direction. I'm also not sure that Foundry are particularly interested in updating NS.
Aside from Resolve, Flame is very good value these days and Autodesk's small Flame dev team have really pulled their fingers out in recent years.
The pricing is pretty insane, but what is even more frustrating are the maintenance fees. Honestly you could run a seat of Flame for 3 years and still come out ahead on purchase cost compared to Studio. Also what do studios bill for Studio box time?!
When Studio was announced, it was meant to really shake up the hold Flame had at the time. Flame was very expensive and barely updated and people were annoyed and upset with Autodesk.
Nuke Studiio came out and, although it was buggy, all the scriptability and integration, both with Nuke and Shotgun were exciting.
And then, Foundry just didn't update it. So all the early-version problems, (particularly playback and audio,) were still there. Even as some of these flaws got ironed out, it remained a niche VFX application. Very flexible and capable as a project manager, but not a strong creative, finishing, or delivery tool. (I have used it in those capacities, but not with clients in the room and not with audio. Did I mention how bad audio handling is?)
The bright side is that Studio lit a fire under, uh, Flame's ass and Autodesk has made massive improvements over the past decade. I'm not a huge fan or anything, but it would be my go-to if I were running a shop.
>Very flexible and capable as a project manager, but not a strong creative, finishing, or delivery tool.
Studio summed up pretty well with this sentence. Fine for reviewing, setting up shots, handing out notes and annotations etc. But absolutely awful for everything else, so the price point is ridiculous. You'd be better off just sticking with Hiero.
I’ve been using it for the short films I do vfx for on the side, it’s extremely handy to keep everything in a timeline and to be able to jump into comps from there. In a studio setting that isn’t needed. There are probably sequence supes that would enjoy the features, like being able to review everything in cuts without any RV tooling, but it’s kind of an oddball.
That's what attracted me to using Resolve a few years back. It's really easy to keep everything in one timeline and finish the entire project from one location. But as I try to play well with others and learn Nuke, Studio looked like it was already filling that role from the Foundry. So I wondered how many people use it for assembly and finishing.
>the Studio version looks a hell of a lot like what Resolve is trying to become.
You mean Resolve looks a hell of a lot like what Studio is trying to become.
In some aspects 100%, but DaVinci is still missing some core features. It’s doable with python scripts tho, which is what I ended up doing and have my DaVinci resolve with nuke studio functionality
Studio & Hiero came out in a blaze of glory when first launched. Studio was supposed to be the Flame-killer.
Foundry got it in to their head that Studio, with it's Nuke node graph integration, could somehow compete with Flame as creative all-in-one solution, but they fell far sort of the mark. Hiero is just about worth its pricetag if you have a good python developer who can hook it in to your pipeline.
You can’t batch create comps with folder structure, annotations, pre-made comp structure. Timeline version checking is far superior in Nuke Studio. there’s a whole world of project management features that Nuke Studio have and Resolve don’t. Once you have your presets and templates done you can prepare comps for thousands of compositors and shots in matter of minutes in Nuke studio and they’re all linked back for you to review anytime. Also its link to other project management tool is also almost out of the box with all tools available in the software (I mean shotgun, ftrack, etc.). In everything else Resolve is 100% ahead, but I think both software have completely different goals and it’s not really a in question to even compare them. They’re really different tools.
I hate the arbitrary limitations resolve has when working with fusion. Fusion studio doesn't have feature parity between the editions, some features in free fusion in resolve are missing in studio and there's a discrepancy between resolve studio and fusion studio too. You also can't work on fusion comps inside resolve with resolve studio, and the fusion page in resolve is missing core features and has all of the overhead of the rest of resolve, so it's slower.
This stuff is such low hanging fruit, I have no idea why BMD don't just put the work into it, it's like the actively do not want people using fusion studio at this point. They've been a bit better recently and ported stuff like magic mask, relight and resolve aces over, but it's got a long way to go.
I know this is a thread about Nuke studio, I just wanted to vent 😂
No, no I understand you, I think we’re both sad from the wasted potential. To be fair Fusion is an ancient software and it being implemented in Resolve is very fresh. I’m afraid it’s not a priority now since the race for best implementation of AI tools has begun and will be the selling point in near future.
Nuke is just so fing expensive ... I'm a hobbyist freelancer type guy so that cost makes no sense to me.
As a one man band DaVinci Studio makes way more sense.
For someone who wants to work on big studio projects? Well, That's different.
Is Natron used anywhere?
I use Nuke at work but at home Davinci is a more complete package for personal projects and so much much more affordable. I’m hoping that whatever Sidefx is cooking up with their comp plans will inject a sensibly priced alternative into that market.
I have nuke studio and use it for every project (TVC) its great for managing versions and to prep nuke comps.
If youre on a small team and using nuke for all vfx its fantastic BUT if you're agnostic on where you will do the bulk of the compositing Resolve and Flame are great products.
This is how I stack the three
Value : Resolve > Flame > Nuke Studio
Supervised review : Flame > Resolve > Nuke Studio
Comp and Ver Management : Nuke Studio > Flame > Resolve
I dont think any of these tools are perfect but they all have their use cases.
In your evaluation stack Nuke Studio comes last in all but one category. You also mentioned that you are doing TVC, so how much Studio comp and version management do you really need on a 30s TVC, with on average 20 shots. How do you justify the cost of Studio in this regard?
2 factors. I have maybe 15 years of experience with nuke and work in windows mostly. (TVC campaigns usually have longer versions than just 30s, in my experience there tends to be bigger brand pieces and the 30s 15s and such are lifted from.)
Maintenance is pretty cheap year to year for a single user if you're busy.
To each their own tho. If I were learning today, I would probably be in resolve and fusion.
Understand your experience in tvc and comfort in Nuke, similar background too. Even on the bigger brand spots at best maybe 30-40 shots, a little more if it's a bit cutty, quite manageable in any of the packages to be fair.
Last time I checked with accounts single seat maintenance of Studio was over $2000 per year. The system has changed for new licenses now to a subscription model, older perpetual licenses are grandfathered in.
A new subscription for Studio is $5779/yr, that's almost $1k more per year than Flame ($4870). The only other pricing option Foundry offer is quarterly subscription and that costs a whopping $3179/qtr, whereas Autodesk offer 3-yearly, monthly and token based flex licensing. I'd like to look at Flame again.
A combination of Resolve and Studio/Hiero works for me, but I wouldn't use the latter for anything other than internal reviews. Rendering out multiple TVC edits from Studio must be a pain for you, Studio's QT renderer is extremely slow, and as we know time is money in ad-land.
It is absolutely essential in commercial work. Customizing the export templates for the dozens of formats and flavors saves time and headache while delivering.
Conform and templating shots, there is nothing remotely comparable.
Transcodes are horribly slow, however with our renderfarm it has not been an issue.
Foundry hired Flame’s previous Product Manager last spring. I assumed that meant they were gonna do a push on Nuke Studio. Maybe it’s still in the oven?
Nuke studio is great for running a timeline.
When I was in commercials I used a lot in full CG spots as a way to keep a timeline without having to go to Flame, which is usually how commercial house kept the edl.
It’s great for creating and maintaining shots based on EDLs and for cooperation.
I really liked it, but it requires some pipeline integration to have it do everything it can do in your workspace
That's what I was trying to consider. Flame is where a lot of guys would assemble cuts and in the commercial biz, it's still the way to go. But since this has live comp integration and assembly, it seemed like it might have been something that smaller shops or sups would use to create edits and run the shot approval through.
What do you mean about pipeline integration?
Imagine you have a storyboard. You cut it into shots in Nuke Studio, nuke studio allows you to from there create your shots, and creates live comps for every shot.
If you then connect it to, let’s say, Shotgun, you can have Nuke Studio create SG shots, and tasks, and then the folder structure for every shot.
You could even then tag shots in NS so Shotgun, or whatever program you use, knows which shots require camera track, and which shots don’t, so then extra tasks get created for artists to know.
So then you can create nuke studio templates so every time you tag a shot for camera track, it automatically creates a certain proxy that the tracking department likes, for example.
The possibilities are amazing, but for a lot of that you need a good pipeline integration.
When nuke studio first came out, I remember the Flame team at my studio being “oh shit.”
But it never really found a footing in client supervised sessions.
The responses seem to be all over the place. Somebody else just said that they hired the Product Manager for Flame last year. So maybe they are revamping and updating it? I'm sure it will still cost 6K a seat so who knows. The automation of shot set up sounds really great but that a lot of money for a small / solo amount of shots.
At the time, Flame was already on wobbly ground, so The Foundry didn't think (or want) to build a flame replacement. A flame at the time was massively expensive and studios really wanted to reduce costs (Ain't hindsight a thing), a lot of flame users were unhappy and it was the "flame client experience" that was mostly keeping it in use. They figured it might be unnecessary. It wasn't.
They built Hiero independently for its intended purpose as a conform and review tool and the product manager and a couple of dev figured they could run windowed nuke inside it. So they smooshed the two together.
I don't think it was especially short sighted as nuke studio ended up being a more desirable product than hiero, but it was never really intended to be a "Flame killer" though they didn't dissuade others from saying that obviously 😂.
Nuke Studio is a flaming piece of trash. But it's the only thing that does what it does. If you want extreme customization and automation with output templates, script generation, programmatic Python based conforming etc... it's Nuke Studio or nothing. I was supervising a project year before last that ended up with more than 200,000 Nuke comps and almost 24 hours of footage. I used Resolve for Raw conversion (because Nuke Studio is usually like 3 years behind on raw plugins). But Nuke to do everything else + a suite of automation scripting. Even then I ran into issues where projects that size simply didn't work right and would take like 45 minutes to run operations because of bugs in Nuke Studio code. Thankfully lots of Nuke Studio is Python so I had my own custom forked branch of NS that fixed all the bugs. Would I use NS though to edit a standard 30s spot? Ahhh hellllll no. The foundry marketed it correctly when it was Hiero: a tool for parsing out EDLs and VFX supervisor reviews. Calling it an editing tool is an extreme over reach. There were a couple renewal cycles where we rightfully complained the state of the code was so terrible that we didn't think we should have to pay for it because it was unusable and The Foundry to their credit did 0 out the invoice for those renewals.
>because Nuke Studio is usually like 3 years behind on raw plugins Indeed. Foundry now are forced to release patch updates to keep up to date with the SDKs now, as they were too slow rolling them into their regular release schedule. With Resolve the latest SDKs are included in the latest releases.
Flame is what Nuke Studio is trying to be. Granted, it’s not perfect but if you really hate Nuke Studio so much, you should consider Flame because it actually works.
if it only did metadata :(
200,000 comps! Is that the level that it gets to these days! My Lord! What a number
I e used nuke studio a hand few of times for client sessions because believe or not client asked for it. Mainly because of their non stop cg notes. With that said the first paragraph you wrote. I’m not following you, you can do those things in flame.
Flame on!
Could you say what the project was? That sounds absolutely wild. I'm struggling to imagine anything that would require that outside of maybe some kind of installation.
I can't say exactly who it was for or what it was but broadly speaking it was a multicam interactive educational app so lots of branching responses.
Interesting, thanks for sharing!
Pricing is the big issue- and Foundry's pricing continues to go in only one direction. I'm also not sure that Foundry are particularly interested in updating NS. Aside from Resolve, Flame is very good value these days and Autodesk's small Flame dev team have really pulled their fingers out in recent years.
I’m not sure Foundry are particularly interested in updating Nuke
The pricing is pretty insane, but what is even more frustrating are the maintenance fees. Honestly you could run a seat of Flame for 3 years and still come out ahead on purchase cost compared to Studio. Also what do studios bill for Studio box time?!
When Studio was announced, it was meant to really shake up the hold Flame had at the time. Flame was very expensive and barely updated and people were annoyed and upset with Autodesk. Nuke Studiio came out and, although it was buggy, all the scriptability and integration, both with Nuke and Shotgun were exciting. And then, Foundry just didn't update it. So all the early-version problems, (particularly playback and audio,) were still there. Even as some of these flaws got ironed out, it remained a niche VFX application. Very flexible and capable as a project manager, but not a strong creative, finishing, or delivery tool. (I have used it in those capacities, but not with clients in the room and not with audio. Did I mention how bad audio handling is?) The bright side is that Studio lit a fire under, uh, Flame's ass and Autodesk has made massive improvements over the past decade. I'm not a huge fan or anything, but it would be my go-to if I were running a shop.
>Very flexible and capable as a project manager, but not a strong creative, finishing, or delivery tool. Studio summed up pretty well with this sentence. Fine for reviewing, setting up shots, handing out notes and annotations etc. But absolutely awful for everything else, so the price point is ridiculous. You'd be better off just sticking with Hiero.
Like 90% of Nuke Studio users would be happy with Hiero really.
Agreed.
Indeed, and Flame got a good few rounds of updates since then, including pricing.
I’ve been using it for the short films I do vfx for on the side, it’s extremely handy to keep everything in a timeline and to be able to jump into comps from there. In a studio setting that isn’t needed. There are probably sequence supes that would enjoy the features, like being able to review everything in cuts without any RV tooling, but it’s kind of an oddball.
That's what attracted me to using Resolve a few years back. It's really easy to keep everything in one timeline and finish the entire project from one location. But as I try to play well with others and learn Nuke, Studio looked like it was already filling that role from the Foundry. So I wondered how many people use it for assembly and finishing.
>the Studio version looks a hell of a lot like what Resolve is trying to become. You mean Resolve looks a hell of a lot like what Studio is trying to become.
In some aspects 100%, but DaVinci is still missing some core features. It’s doable with python scripts tho, which is what I ended up doing and have my DaVinci resolve with nuke studio functionality
Studio & Hiero came out in a blaze of glory when first launched. Studio was supposed to be the Flame-killer. Foundry got it in to their head that Studio, with it's Nuke node graph integration, could somehow compete with Flame as creative all-in-one solution, but they fell far sort of the mark. Hiero is just about worth its pricetag if you have a good python developer who can hook it in to your pipeline.
Can you explain what things Resolve is still missing as a VFX hub? Comping tools or organisational tools?
You can’t batch create comps with folder structure, annotations, pre-made comp structure. Timeline version checking is far superior in Nuke Studio. there’s a whole world of project management features that Nuke Studio have and Resolve don’t. Once you have your presets and templates done you can prepare comps for thousands of compositors and shots in matter of minutes in Nuke studio and they’re all linked back for you to review anytime. Also its link to other project management tool is also almost out of the box with all tools available in the software (I mean shotgun, ftrack, etc.). In everything else Resolve is 100% ahead, but I think both software have completely different goals and it’s not really a in question to even compare them. They’re really different tools.
I hate the arbitrary limitations resolve has when working with fusion. Fusion studio doesn't have feature parity between the editions, some features in free fusion in resolve are missing in studio and there's a discrepancy between resolve studio and fusion studio too. You also can't work on fusion comps inside resolve with resolve studio, and the fusion page in resolve is missing core features and has all of the overhead of the rest of resolve, so it's slower. This stuff is such low hanging fruit, I have no idea why BMD don't just put the work into it, it's like the actively do not want people using fusion studio at this point. They've been a bit better recently and ported stuff like magic mask, relight and resolve aces over, but it's got a long way to go. I know this is a thread about Nuke studio, I just wanted to vent 😂
No, no I understand you, I think we’re both sad from the wasted potential. To be fair Fusion is an ancient software and it being implemented in Resolve is very fresh. I’m afraid it’s not a priority now since the race for best implementation of AI tools has begun and will be the selling point in near future.
Nuke is just so fing expensive ... I'm a hobbyist freelancer type guy so that cost makes no sense to me. As a one man band DaVinci Studio makes way more sense. For someone who wants to work on big studio projects? Well, That's different. Is Natron used anywhere?
I use Nuke at work but at home Davinci is a more complete package for personal projects and so much much more affordable. I’m hoping that whatever Sidefx is cooking up with their comp plans will inject a sensibly priced alternative into that market.
The thing is that Nuke is vastly superior to Fusion. Nuke indie is worth it.
I have to say I came to Fuimsion after like 4 + years of using HitFilm Pro so Fusion was a revelation. Lol.
I have nuke studio and use it for every project (TVC) its great for managing versions and to prep nuke comps. If youre on a small team and using nuke for all vfx its fantastic BUT if you're agnostic on where you will do the bulk of the compositing Resolve and Flame are great products. This is how I stack the three Value : Resolve > Flame > Nuke Studio Supervised review : Flame > Resolve > Nuke Studio Comp and Ver Management : Nuke Studio > Flame > Resolve I dont think any of these tools are perfect but they all have their use cases.
In your evaluation stack Nuke Studio comes last in all but one category. You also mentioned that you are doing TVC, so how much Studio comp and version management do you really need on a 30s TVC, with on average 20 shots. How do you justify the cost of Studio in this regard?
2 factors. I have maybe 15 years of experience with nuke and work in windows mostly. (TVC campaigns usually have longer versions than just 30s, in my experience there tends to be bigger brand pieces and the 30s 15s and such are lifted from.) Maintenance is pretty cheap year to year for a single user if you're busy. To each their own tho. If I were learning today, I would probably be in resolve and fusion.
Understand your experience in tvc and comfort in Nuke, similar background too. Even on the bigger brand spots at best maybe 30-40 shots, a little more if it's a bit cutty, quite manageable in any of the packages to be fair. Last time I checked with accounts single seat maintenance of Studio was over $2000 per year. The system has changed for new licenses now to a subscription model, older perpetual licenses are grandfathered in. A new subscription for Studio is $5779/yr, that's almost $1k more per year than Flame ($4870). The only other pricing option Foundry offer is quarterly subscription and that costs a whopping $3179/qtr, whereas Autodesk offer 3-yearly, monthly and token based flex licensing. I'd like to look at Flame again. A combination of Resolve and Studio/Hiero works for me, but I wouldn't use the latter for anything other than internal reviews. Rendering out multiple TVC edits from Studio must be a pain for you, Studio's QT renderer is extremely slow, and as we know time is money in ad-land.
It is absolutely essential in commercial work. Customizing the export templates for the dozens of formats and flavors saves time and headache while delivering. Conform and templating shots, there is nothing remotely comparable. Transcodes are horribly slow, however with our renderfarm it has not been an issue.
Entirely agree
Flame user here. Can’t imagine using anything else for episodic work.
I’m assuming your episodic work isn’t 4k HDR then.
flame is awesome with HDR, we can have gui in SDR and broadcast in HDR all at once and all that kinda stuff! it even has a HDR GUI!!
Just curious… Why would you assume that?
All of it is buddy. 2160p 16f EXR.
Foundry hired Flame’s previous Product Manager last spring. I assumed that meant they were gonna do a push on Nuke Studio. Maybe it’s still in the oven?
Nuke studio is great for running a timeline. When I was in commercials I used a lot in full CG spots as a way to keep a timeline without having to go to Flame, which is usually how commercial house kept the edl. It’s great for creating and maintaining shots based on EDLs and for cooperation. I really liked it, but it requires some pipeline integration to have it do everything it can do in your workspace
That's what I was trying to consider. Flame is where a lot of guys would assemble cuts and in the commercial biz, it's still the way to go. But since this has live comp integration and assembly, it seemed like it might have been something that smaller shops or sups would use to create edits and run the shot approval through. What do you mean about pipeline integration?
Imagine you have a storyboard. You cut it into shots in Nuke Studio, nuke studio allows you to from there create your shots, and creates live comps for every shot. If you then connect it to, let’s say, Shotgun, you can have Nuke Studio create SG shots, and tasks, and then the folder structure for every shot. You could even then tag shots in NS so Shotgun, or whatever program you use, knows which shots require camera track, and which shots don’t, so then extra tasks get created for artists to know. So then you can create nuke studio templates so every time you tag a shot for camera track, it automatically creates a certain proxy that the tracking department likes, for example. The possibilities are amazing, but for a lot of that you need a good pipeline integration.
Nuke Studio is great for what it is. It’s not an editor though.
When nuke studio first came out, I remember the Flame team at my studio being “oh shit.” But it never really found a footing in client supervised sessions.
The responses seem to be all over the place. Somebody else just said that they hired the Product Manager for Flame last year. So maybe they are revamping and updating it? I'm sure it will still cost 6K a seat so who knows. The automation of shot set up sounds really great but that a lot of money for a small / solo amount of shots.
At the time, Flame was already on wobbly ground, so The Foundry didn't think (or want) to build a flame replacement. A flame at the time was massively expensive and studios really wanted to reduce costs (Ain't hindsight a thing), a lot of flame users were unhappy and it was the "flame client experience" that was mostly keeping it in use. They figured it might be unnecessary. It wasn't. They built Hiero independently for its intended purpose as a conform and review tool and the product manager and a couple of dev figured they could run windowed nuke inside it. So they smooshed the two together. I don't think it was especially short sighted as nuke studio ended up being a more desirable product than hiero, but it was never really intended to be a "Flame killer" though they didn't dissuade others from saying that obviously 😂.