- [Instructor] The timeline shows what frame your job is on
and has several features to speed up shot development,
as well as to help manage large composites.
So, if I play my little clip here,
you can see I'm caching it in the timeline.
And now, if I stop that,
one of the features we have is you can move the play head,
this little orange triangle right here,
by clicking and dragging on him, put him anywhere you want.
You can also just come down to a place on the timeline
and click and it'll jump to it.
Another important feature here is the current frame number.
It's reporting what frame the play head is on.
I'll jump to 30, it says 30.
However, you can also enter a frame number
for it to jump to.
Let's put in 25 Return.
The play head jumps to frame 25.
Now, this may sound like a trivial feature
until you're working on a 1,000-frame shot
and the tick marks in the timeline are so tiny,
you cannot get the play head on the exact frame you want.
That's when you enter a custom frame number right here.
Another feature of this is
you can actually enter an offset.
I'll select it and I'll enter +5.
When I hit Return, the play head
will actually jump to frame 30.
Now, the timeline also reports the first frame here
in the timeline, and the last frame here in the timeline.
These are not necessarily
the first and last frames of the shot.
It depends on where you have your timeline focused.
Down below is the number of frames you have
between those two frames on the timeline.
Now, we can zoom the timeline
with an Alt + middle mouse button drag left and right.
And notice that my first timeline frame
and my last timeline frame has changed,
as well as the total number of frames
in the timeline has changed.
Now, we can pan with an Alt + left mouse button
drag left and right,
and again my first and last frames are updating,
but the number of frames is unaffected
because I have not changed the length
of the frames in the timeline.
To re-home the timeline,
just click your middle mouse button.
Now, you can also select a specific visible frame range.
Let's say I just want to play 21 to 30.
So I can do that with a Cmd or Ctrl +
middle mouse drag and release,
and my timeline has snapped to frame 21 to 30,
and it's showing 10 frames in the timeline.
And we'll re-home that with a middle mouse button click.
We also have in and out points.
This letter I here, so let me jump the play head
to frame 10, click on the letter I.
I'll move the play head a little bit.
This little orange bar and the number 10,
that's my in point, this guy has lit up orange.
If I put my play head on frame 40
and click the O here, that's my output timeline.
So those are my in and out points.
We get this little red icon here
which allows me to turn the in and out point on and off.
Now, Nuke will remember those over the length of the shot,
but it will not save them in your Nuke script.
One of the very useful features
of the in and out points is the first and last frame buttons
now go to the in and out points,
not the first and last frames of the shot.
Okay, I'm going to move my viewer over here
to this 100-frame clip,
in order to show you some more features of the timeline.
By default, the timeline frame range is set to Global,
which is the length of your shot
as defined in your project settings.
This is a 50-frame shot.
I let go, let me turn off my in and out points,
I am now looking at 50 frames.
However, if I set it to Input,
that means to set the timeline to the length
of the clip the viewer is hooked to,
regardless of the shot length.
Well, this is a 100-frame clip,
so now the timeline shows one to 100.
I'll turn on my in and out points.
I can now tell the viewer, if I want,
to show me just the in and out point ranges, boom.
So now the timeline is only showing
my in and out points of 10 to 40.
We'll go back to Global.
Remember before, I set a custom range
with Cmd or Ctrl + middle mouse drag,
so if I put that in here,
I'm going to turn off my in and out points,
the timeline now shows Visible.
Visible means that custom range that I did,
I could go back to Global,
but Nuke will remember my Visible.
So I could go back to Visible
and it remembers my frame range, very nice.
Back to Global.
I'm going to reconnect back to the Merge Node
to show you the Animation Loop Controls,
which are located right here, this popup.
By default, the timeline will loop
any animation that you're playing.
So just keep playing it over and over again, okay.
The next option here is the Bounce,
or what I call ping pong,
where the play head will ping pong forwards and backwards.
Now, this can be very handy for troubleshooting animation.
The next one is Stop.
What that means is play once and stop
when you get to the end of the shot.
Put that back to the first frame.
And the last one is Continue,
which means pay no attention to nothing
and just keep playing no matter what.
You see my frame counter is just going crazy over here.
And we'll stop that.
And let's put this back to Repeat.
And we'll re-home the play head to frame one.
The next feature is Timeline Frames.
Nuke, by default, is designed for feature film work,
which is counted in frame numbers.
However, if you're working on a video job,
you may prefer to see video timecode, like that, okay.
That's just too weird, back to frames.
Okay, I'm going to re-set play head to frame one
to show you the play head speed controls.
And tell you what, let's clear all the cache
so that we have to recompute the picture.
In fact, I'm even going to add a Blur Node here
set to 100, in order to slow down the processing.
This number right here represents the current speed
that the play head is moving.
Now, when it's caching, that's going to be somewhat slower.
After it's cached, it should play back at that speed,
given the horsepower of your workstation
and the resolution of your screen.
Okay, so I'm going to hit Play
and let's watch that number while it's caching.
Here we go, okay.
So we've got seven frames per second, or so.
Once it's all cached, boom, it plays back
at 24 frames per second.
Now, the kinky thing I wanted to show you is,
sometimes for troubleshooting an animation,
you'd like it to play back slower than that.
So we can enter a number here, like say four,
that means play the thing back at four frames per second.
Chug, chug, chug, there you go.
So again, that could be helpful
for troubleshooting your animation.
With this popup, we can set the play back speed
to the project settings,
and the project settings is marked by the asterisk.
So we'll be looking at the project settings
in the very next video.