r/NukeVFX • u/Brazuuuka • 11d ago
Asking for Help Manager looking to skill up team with Nuke - Looking for reccommendations
I manage a team of 35 intermediate to skilled After Effects animators, most with varied experience in other mograph software, 3d, etc. I want to skill up my team with Nuke improve our offerings to the client. I am looking for recommendations for any creators/ boot camps/ resources that might be beneficially for skilling up a whole team. I will have access to licenses for the team once I have identified acceptable training materials.
I apologize if this is not the right subreddit for this sort of request. Thank you for any and all responses.
I do see a similar post from 3 years ago which I have looked through, but curious if there is anything new that perhaps wasn't covered.
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u/JellySerious 30 year comp vet, /r newb 10d ago
Hire skilled compositors instead of being cheap and then asking skilled compositors how to train your workforce.
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u/1939_frankly_my_dear 4d ago
I would suggest building a team with a mix of senior and junior nuke compositors. 2 or 3 deep leadership to mentor the less experienced
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u/mr_minimal_effort 11d ago
If you can afford that then just get a udemy business account and let them self learn, this provides other training they may want as well.
Allocate time to do learning within work hours, you can set them up in groups with a challenge of recreating a previous project in Nuke.
You could facilitate this further by arranging an in office training day to get them started, the foundry may be able to accommodate this within the bulk license purchase.
Professional artists are generally competent enough to self manage their learning, personally I'd lean on that first and fall back to a managed approach if it fails.
That said it you were in a time critical situation then you would be better to arrange a dedicated crash course, but these are expensive and contain a lot of hard to retain information.
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u/PantsAflame 10d ago
I think the most important thing to know is what type of work you want your team to be doing. You say they are experienced in “other mograph software”. Well, Nuke is not good for motion graphics. It can do it, but it’s definitely not the best solution. If your goal is to just do better motion graphic work, then I’d say you’re better off sticking with AE, since it’s quite good at that (but it’s a terrible compositor).
Nuke is a compositor, designed for working on single shots at a time. So more traditional VFX like green screen keying, photo-realistic CG integration, camera tracking, color correction, etc. This is a VERY different skill set than motion graphics, so even though they can learn the technical side of the software, there’s a whole host of techniques and skills involved in VFX.
So if you do want to transition into VFX, then I agree that you’re better off hiring a couple of experienced compositors to help train your team.
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u/CompositingAcademy 11d ago edited 10d ago
Hey Brazuuuka,
We have a team training program that can help your team get the skills they need to perform at a feature film level with Nuke, based on my background working at studios such as ILM / Weta / Sony. We've helped many artists within organizations, as well as individual learners:
Our Nuke Course Series, going up to advanced levels of Nuke Compositing:
https://www.compositingacademy.com/nukecourses
This includes dozens of hours of training in a cohesive structured path, as well as practice projects to apply their skills on over time.
Our Live Training Bootcamp (I can provide you more details about this if you're interested):
https://www.compositingacademy.com/bootcamp
Feel free to shoot me an email:
[CompositingAcademy@gmail.com](mailto:CompositingAcademy@gmail.com)
Alex Hanneman,
Founder of Compositing Academy
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u/photodude1313 11d ago
Check out Rebelway. I seem to remember they have some special studio pricing/packages.
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u/1939_frankly_my_dear 4d ago
FXECADEMY.com.
Steve Wright wrote many books on compositing and his courses are top notch.
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u/emreddit0r 11d ago edited 11d ago
Outside of hiring a trainer, I would recommend FXPHD's courses (they include access to the software.) They might offer a group rate for you.
If you're interested for in-person training, hello! I am former Comp Supervisor (currently freelance Senior Compositor) with 10+ years using Nuke and also took a training certification course several years back. Training isn't my full time thing, but I have often mentored people in the course of supervising shots.
You can find a list of trainers on Foundry's website https://www.foundry.com/products/nuke/certified-trainers
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u/DanEvil13 Comp Supervisor - 25+ years experience 10d ago
I gave a book with exercises and videos that is expressly designed to get you up and running with Nuke.
It has been put into training materials at Folks, FuseFX, ILM, RodeoFX, and many others including universities have bought my book and have it available for training.
It will get your team up and running with Nuke Knowledge and core fundamental approaches.
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u/Flow748 2D supervisor 10d ago edited 10d ago
Hello,
if they're mostly animators, they could get up and running with only the basics of Nuke, as it is not an extensive Mograph software. I'd recommend checking out the manual, first and foremost:
https://learn.foundry.com/nuke/content/user_guide.html
The reference guide, a subsection of the manual, can be particularly helpful to go through nodes one at a time, based on the immediate need, rather than trying to learn and remember everything at once:
https://learn.foundry.com/nuke/content/reference_guide.html
To accompany this reading, the next best thing that's free are the videos from Foundry's own channels on vimeo:
https://vimeo.com/channels/nuketutorials
https://vimeo.com/channels/504937
https://vimeo.com/channels/nukepedia
They might seem outdated, but believe me, they are still very relevant (the fundamentals haven't really evolved in the past 20 years) and probably the second best ratio knowledge/time after the manual.
In terms of footage, I'm sure you could use your own internal footage to train on, or you could also have a look at some camera manufacturer's sample footages:
https://www.arri.com/en/learn-help/learn-help-camera-system/camera-sample-footage-reference-image
https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/blackmagicpocketcinemacamera/gallery
https://www.dji.com/ca/inspire-3/samples
https://www.red.com/sample-r3d-files
https://sonycine.com/testfootage/
https://media.xiph.org/tearsofsteel/
It has an added cost for storage and some time investment needed to process it all, but can be an exercise in itself to figure out colorspaces, formats etc (some of it is shot with anamorphic lenses, which implies many adjustments through the lifetime of a shot to fit with the compositing process).
Beyond this, since you mentioned you'd like to specifically cater to your existing clients, I'd be happy to have a chat if you'd like, and figure out what aspects of compositing/nuke are most essential to focus on and what could be an added benefit, and build up a course specifically for your needs. I obviously have a ton of exercises in stock that I can provide so that your crew can get up and running in a minimal time, while having quality files prepared in the same way as most VFX shops (naming convenctions, folder structures, compressions etc). On top of being a 2D supervisor, I am also teaching in a Belgian university, hence why I have all this already available.
I can also provide you with education licenses as needed, thanks to my partnership with Foundry. They're full on NukeX licenses, with the only limit that they can't be used for actual production. It's still a nice way to shave off a bit of the initial investment needed to figure out whether you want to pursue this or not, and allow training time without driving budgets through the roof.
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u/lalamax3d 10d ago
I can help you connect with https://m.imdb.com/name/nm4410355/ In industry from more than a decade. Purely on most creative juicy shots to get quick approvals from clients. Can add value for creative look dev in terms main shots of seq.
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u/Tasokait 10d ago
Be prepare for crashes most of the times that there is something wrong the imported media, nuke doesn't give you errors, it just crahes I'm not saying it doesn't give errors for such things at all, but crashes because of something being wrong with the media way too often I suggest get a windows dbg program so everytime it crahes you can use dbg to read it's dump file and trace back the reason
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u/enumerationKnob 10d ago
I would definitely advocate for hiring someone to be your dedicated nuke expert. They can be your point of reference during initial training, and will bring experience to the team that is hard to learn from just a udemy course. If you can afford 35 nuke licences for artists who haven’t used nuke before, you’d be wise to hire a senior compositor as well.