After Effects vs. Nuke for Compositing

Want to know the difference between After Effects and Nuke for compositing? You've come to the right place.
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Partial, Auto-Generated Transcript Below 👇

Music (00:02): [intro music]

Joey Korenman (00:17): What's up guys, Joey here at school of motion.com. And in this video, we are going to talk about one of my favorite topics, which is nuke. And what I'm going to try and do is show you the difference between a layer based composite or like after effects and a node based compositor, like nuke one isn't necessarily better than the other. They're just different tools. And depending on what task you're doing, one might be a little bit easier to use. And I know a lot of you guys out there have probably never used nuke and you may really just kind of be scared of it. And so I want to show you how it works and why it's so cool and why can actually be useful to a motion graphics artists and not just a visual effects artists. So let's hop in and get started. So we're going to start in after effects since I'm sure that's what most of you are more comfortable with.

Joey Korenman (00:59): And what I have here is a pretty typical 3d composite setup where I've rendered out multiple passes from cinema 4d. I've rendered them as a multipass EXR file. So I have one set of files here, one image sequence, and I've pulled that in and I've used the built-in extractor effect to pull out each pass from the EXR files. So I've got my lighting passes, like my diffuse pass, and I'll just solo them one at a time. So you can see what they look like. This is the diffuse lighting pass. This is the specular pass. This is the ambient pass reflection, global illumination. And now I get into my shadow passes. So I've actually got a shadow pass and I've got an ambient occlusion pass. And then up here, I haven't turned off. I've got an object buffer for the sky, the floor and the spikes.

Joey Korenman (01:53): So all of these are feeding from the same set of image sequences here, and I'm using this effect. It's in the 3d channel group extractor to pull each of those channels out one at a time. And I've set, I've already set up my, uh, my compositing. So, you know, diffuse is generally the channel I start with. That's my base. And then I'll add all of the lighting channels on top of it. Now I don't want to get too much into the actual compositing part of this, but it is very important to know that I'm in 32 bit mode and I'm actually compositing in a linear workspace. Uh, and the reason that I'm doing that is because EXR files out of cinema 4d are 32 bit. So I have tons and tons of color information, and that's wonderful. Um, so you can see here that this is my compositing setup and, you know, if I just pull all of my passes in and I set this up and I now look at it, all I'm seeing is a list of passes and I'm seeing layers, right?

Joey Korenman (02:51): Just these bars that go across. And if I really want to look at all of my passes and try to understand what I have to work with to, to help myself figure out how to composite these things, the only way to do it is to solo them one at a time. All right? And that's not really that intuitive of a way to composite. If you composite in after effects, you certainly get used to this, but let me show you a different way. So now we're going to hop into nuke. I'll show you what it looks like in nuke. So this is the nuke interface, and if you've never opened nuke, if you've never played with it, this is going to look a little bit alien to you. Um, it works very differently than after effects and I'll admit, I mean, it took me a while to get the hang of it.

Joey Korenman (03:32): But once I did, it is so much nicer to composite 3d passes together and really control the way your image looks in nuke. So the first thing you're probably noticing is I've got all of my passes, kind of laid out here in front of me, like cards on a table, right? And I don't have to sort of, you know, guess what the reflection pass looks like. I can actually see a little thumbnail of it, but the way nuke is set up, you have instant access to any single one of these little thumbnails at any time. Now these are called nodes. Nuke is a node based compositor. And the, one of the great things about nodes is you can look at any note at any time in nuke. If you hit the one key, you can see this little viewer here, this little doubt dotted line is going to jump to whatever I select and then hit one.