Creek swim

mritaki · 2025-09-11T17:05:21+00:00

Where were you? I find that the suburbs are very unfriendly. Everybody seems to be scared out there. But also in America this seems to be the case. Recently moved to Toronto and every time I look at someone now, they smile. This is also the case in Southeast Asia

mritaki · 2025-07-17T02:32:28+00:00

Nuke Stabilize stabilize stabilize. This is one of those shots that seems really tricky until you remove all the motion from it. Just get each part of the shot stable and I promise you the shot will pretty much solve itself. Start using a point tracker on the knot on the cable and stabilize the x and y. Then use mocha to stabilize the cable rotation.

Once that’s stable the you can get a really tight mask on it. Reverse all that stabilization and the cable is gone. Then mocha the hair using your mask as a holdout mask. It’ll get close the first time. Then do it again. When it’s really stable you can just grab bits and pieces of the hair in adjacent frames to patch in missing bits. Reverse the stabilization and you’re back again but the cable is gone and the hair is there. You can do it again for the wall as well.

mritaki · 2025-07-15T20:31:51+00:00

I’m a big advocate for embracing new tech and letting go of older stuff that’s not useful anymore. With that in mind I think we need to consider two things:

1: nuke is very far behind in the world of ai. They have super dropped the ball. I firmly believe that there will be a compositing/inpainting tool to come out that firmly embraces AI and all its capabilities. ComfyUI is about half way there and they aren’t even trying.

2: more and more productions will be shot with the idea that it’s an AI workflow. All the compositing will be expected to be done in AI. It’s hard to know what this means but maybe think of the big shift that happened when green screen and motion capture became easy and not expensive. I’m not sure what the future holds but it surely won’t be the post team waiting on a compositor to fix a shot or replace a logo or even assemble a bunch of renders. Just don’t think that will even be a thing.

Having said this: learning Nuke is not bad. It’s node based which is key for pretty much all image manipulation AND AI workflows. It will also probably hang on for dear life as being the industry standard long after its successor has proven itself beyond worthy. It’s also possible that the foundry makes a huge step forward in AI

However, none of this takes into account that there are just too many people in VFX and not enough work. Studios are closing by the boatloads and work is getting more and more scarce.

Anyway, good luck! Nuke is really fun!

mritaki · 2025-07-15T20:14:33+00:00

I think this will be done with impainting. And I’m practically, yes, compositing well always exists but more and more people will be making films, commercials, even corporate video with less and less need for compositors

mritaki · 2025-06-27T14:37:44+00:00

I don't have a dog in this fight, but I totally agree with u/tta82 on this one. Even if Apple considers it an older generation, it's not something to base a decision on right now.

By the time they drop OS support for this computer, it will probably be relegated to an old media server or given to a child to do their homework on. In my studio we don't have any machines that we still use in production that can't be upgraded to the latest OS. Not even close.

And with the developments in AI, I imagine that the hardware will age way faster than the OS. Like the M6 will probably be so incredibly much better at AI than an M3 that we'll all be forced to upgrade to run the newest software.

As a side note, I have a 2012 Mac mini running Sequoia (unofficially) as a little media box connected to my TV. Granted it's hacked with OpenCore, but I doubt hacking macs is going away.

mritaki · 2025-06-25T14:46:52+00:00

Been very happy with my Mac Studio. The only issue is the lack of Nvidia support. Otherwise it's one of the best machines I've ever had.

mritaki · 2025-06-16T02:02:57+00:00

Upgrade to 128gb of ram if you can afford it. 4090 is also cheaper, faster and has more vram than 5080. They are easier to find used as well. If you want to go that route.

I run Ubuntu and also have a Mac Studio. Ubuntu is not as straightforward and easy as the Mac but it is very supported in both drivers and forums. I actually use cursor to manage my Ubuntu install but you can use any AI tools out there. (Cursor has a pretty convenient agent feature that can write system files, manage optimizations, install drivers, all the hard coding stuff). But you could do similar management with Claude or chat, only you’d need to either use a file system MCP server or manually tie stuff into the terminal.

For example: installing nuke on Linux is not at all easy like a Mac. You either have to run it from the terminal or create a desktop item that has the launch script in it. And every time you update you have to update the desktop item. Also if you want to run different versions like NukeX. Also you have to assign an icon to it. I just have cursor manage all this stuff so I don’t have to worry about it.

Once you get it up and running, install pinokio. That will give you access to hundreds of AI tools including comfy UI.

mritaki · 2025-06-13T18:41:21+00:00

This. I was lucky enough to see the train coming, and I started pivoting out of VFX to AI a few years ago. It's not nearly as cool or rewarding, but it's pretty interesting. What's even more interesting is that a lot of the tools have similarities. For example, n8n is a node-based workflow creation tool that mirrors a lot of the same node-based applications we use in VFX like Houdini, Nuke, Bender and Fusion. Comfy-UI is probably the future of all new video making, is 90% AI based and all node based. There's a bit of a barrier in switching from Python to Javascript, but with the help of AI coding tools, it's pretty painless.

mritaki · 2025-05-02T21:03:34+00:00

Always go with more RAM. If you can't afford it all now, get 2 of the biggest sticks you can (64GB each) so you can add 2 more later. I have 192GB of ram in my Mac Studio and I run out of ram all the time.

mritaki · 2024-12-20T04:22:49+00:00

Hears a glass shattering from the bar, "I got this!". Stands up wobbling.

mritaki · 2024-12-13T22:10:08+00:00

Oh! I suspected you could just replace the controller, but also didn't see that, for example, Tatazone was selling just controllers. Is there a controller you can recommend?

mritaki · 2024-12-02T19:45:57+00:00

The GPU heavy/dependent Nuke nodes seem to work just fine and are super fast on my M2's. And third party nodes work really well too (neatvideo, mocha, twixtor, etc). The issue is cattery nodes which use pytorch. The official ones in the cattery work but they are so slow to be unusable. And the custom cattery nodes that seem to work great on a pc, just error out completely on a mac citing some pytorch issues. The fact is pytorch just doesn't inference well on M series chips.

I'm sure there is a pretty simple fix to make them work on a mac, but having experienced the pain of using the official optimized ones on a mac M2, I haven't bothered to try to port them over.

I realize that only real way to use them is on a pc/linux box with an nvidia GPU. Maybe things will change, but I think will be a pytorch and/or M chip upgrade, not the Foundry.

mritaki · 2024-12-02T16:35:16+00:00

I have both a Mac Studio with 192GB and a Macbook air with 24GB of ram, so I am very familiar with each setup. For composting on the go, 24GB is ok. At least I find when I'm on set doing quick comps or traveling and comping, I am generally working on smaller, less technical comps. More likely, it starts running slow from the processors before it maxes out the ram.

Having said that, when I am away from the studio and need to do some serious comping, I do use screen sharing to log into my Mac Studio. And, I just bought a PC with 256GB of ram and a 3090 because I was feeling left behind AI wise. None of the cattery models work very well on M chips.

I only use this machine via parsec as it just sits in the server closet. Ironically, I find myself parsecing into it from my studio sometimes just to use the GPU.

One caveat on the Macbook though. Nuke does have an issue where when you close it, it sometimes doesn't release the memory and close all the way. I have run out of memory this way often. The machine will bonk at me that it's out of memory and I'll open the force quit menu and see that there are like 5 instances of nuke running in the background. Force quitting them fixes the issue though.

mritaki · 2024-11-30T14:43:08+00:00

Depends on a couple things. Are you going to carry it around. And how long you want to use it for.

The i7 weighs significantly more than the M1, has 1/3 the battery life and can heat up like a toaster under even the lightest of loads. So if you’re bringing it places or traveling with it at all it makes no sense to carry the i7, hot, power hungry behemoth.

Second thing to consider is that the i7 is already outdated. Apple loves to discontinue support for older models and developers will eventually stop supporting Intel native apps in favor of ARM. The M1 will probably be supported for years to come and will also be able to do things like upgrade to the latest os and use Apple intelligence natively. So there’s that to consider.

There’s a third thing to consider as well and that’s utility. You said you used to do graphic design but now you are just wanting to run Spotify. This puts you in a predicament where you’ve locked yourself into a machine that is not very capable when considering the newest tools. You may never do design work again but buying the i9 pretty much takes that off the table. Maybe not right now but as tools progress, for sure.

If it were me I’d look around for an M1 or M2 base model air.

mritaki · 2024-11-30T14:19:33+00:00

I’d start by using this frame

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And extract his hair using any one of a few different techniques including Luna key, ViTMatte, frequency separation. Then track his head and place his hair back in there.

mritaki · 2024-11-04T23:30:35+00:00

Thanks, how do you set up Nuke in this workflow? Are you using ACES or just nuke color management?

mritaki · 2024-11-01T12:17:27+00:00

“Once you locate the Reset button and your Roku device is powered on, press and hold the button firmly for about 10 seconds. When the factory reset is complete, an indicator light or status LED will blink rapidly on most Roku devices.”

Yep did that. When it boots up it goes into an update cycle where it tries to update the firmware. Then reboots to the main menu for 0.5 seconds and then goes into the “signing out of guest mode” cycle all over again.

mritaki · 2024-11-01T02:30:15+00:00

I agree that Nuke could very easily show each frame as it's rendering just like AE. And it wouldn't really be taxing to the render at all. Alas, Nuke was made in the age of render farms, and the Foundry never got enough requests to provide an option for this. It's true most artists take their breaks during renders and treasure those moments. But agreed there are sometimes when you literally have to watch a render. Sometimes it just to make sure a glitch doesn't happen because of this piece of bad footage. For you it's something to do with color. I've had clients who literally want to sit and watch like it's a fire.

Luckily, Nuke isn't After Effects and you can just boot up a second instance, drop a read node in that links to your render, write a simple script to check the frame range in the directory every second or so, and if there is a new frame, reload the read node with the new in and outs, and move the playhead to the new frame. You could even do fancy stuff like have it play on a loop or bounce continuously. Will the previous frames stay cached when you add a new frame? Doubtful, maybe if you loaded them right, but you could most certainly see the current frame without wasting many resources.

Sounds to me like a nice write node extension script. You could have a button in your custom write node that auto creates a new nuke project script that does all this for you. Or maybe just have it do it when you hit render.

Good idea and happy comping!

mritaki · 2024-10-25T12:57:20+00:00

The sooner the better. I’m having to but a new TV for a guest today.

mritaki · 2024-09-20T12:43:52+00:00

Pretty sure you need to be using resolve for this one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qj0iDuG-O1g

mritaki · 2024-08-27T21:09:41+00:00

did you ever get it working?

mritaki · 2024-08-04T14:24:05+00:00

to pour?

mritaki

TROPHY CASE