Making Shot Breakdowns In Nuke

🔒 How to build an automated setup for breaking down shots in Nuke… 

In this guide, we’ll build a versatile setup for breaking down shots in Nuke. 

The setup is very useful for when you’re making a showreel. With it, you can showcase the different layers that make up your composites in an efficient way. 

We’ll go through the logic and mechanics of how to build a setup that automatically adapts to any input format and shot length, and we’ll write some advanced expressions to make it all easily controllable via a single control panel. 

The setup has two different modes: 

1. The freeze frame mode, which is ideal for shots with a short frame range. 
2. The running frames mode, which is ideal for shots with a long frame range. 

In the settings, you can also choose: 

1. Which frame to freeze or start the breakdown on. 
2. How long to hold on each layer for. 
3. How long the wipe should take. 
4. The direction of the wipe. 
5. Whether to display a wipe line. 
6. The width of the wipe line. 
7. The colour of the wipe line. 

And then with some linked expressions, the setup does the whole breakdown job for you, automatically. 

Here’s what it outputs (with placeholder layers): 

Freeze frame setup. 

Running frames setup.