Nuke Indie

The Foundry has announced today that they are releasing an indie version of their compositing package Nuke. This is great news for anyone who does occasional freelance gigs and needs to think of their budget.

To be eligible for Nuke Indie your annual gross revenue must be less than USD$100,000/year (or local equivalent), which is the same criteria as Houdini Indie and Maya Indie. Likewise, you cannot work in the same pipeline with other Nuke commercial or Nuke Indie licenses, so it is meant for smaller productions, but the market for those is quite significant as well. For further details on eligibility, see Nuke Indie Eligibility Requirements.

How much does it cost?

The Nuke Indie is priced at £399/yr on subscription, which should be affordable for most freelancers. You can do a few shots in a music-video for a friend for that price and that’s got your whole year covered. Or do that other comparison of not drinking a coffee every day that costs £1.09… As if you could actually get a coffee anywhere at that price these days!

But is it going to be really functionally limited and totally useless?

No! Like most other Indie packages from other companies, it does have some limitations, but what amazes me the most is that it has NukeStudio at its core and it is not just costly version of Nuke non-commercial! Basically, you get all the functionality of NukeX (SmartVectors, CameraTracker, GridWarpTracker) and you get the editorial and conform and versioning of NukeStudio!!! This means that you can also conform your friend’s music video, do the shots with whatever tools you’ve always had in Nuke and then output a fully colour-managed timeline to your Colour Grader / DI guys. The limitations that it does have are:

Output limited to 4K (That still covers a quite lot my needs and if your friend wants her music-video at 8K, then maybe you can ask for the full fee…)
Basic Python Support (If your main thing is being a Nuke developer and you just really like scripting, then you can get in touch with them because they actually do like people creating new functionality for Nuke)
No External Rendering Support (so you have to render on your own machine and can’t send it to the cloud, but for the ~£8000 that you’re saving you can probably buy yourself a better workstation now)
No Third Party Plug-in support (you can still download all the gizmo’s you want from Nukepedia or make your own)

Also, some of those limitations are likely to come under review as more users are going to have specific requests (e.g. during the announcement event several attendees were asking for support for Neat Video), so it’ll be interesting to see what the future updates for this are going to be like.