NUKE Non Commercial is released!

Just a few minutes I got an email saying the NUKE Non Commercial is now released. This means that users who don’t have to money for NUKE, or are just wanting to play around with it, can without annoying water marks and trial only versions.

There are a few limitation, but nothing major, unless you want to use this to make money.

http://www.thefoundry.co.uk/products/nuke/non-commercial/

That’s good! Their pricing for commercial version is insane though.

I wonder how this is going to affect the relatively new FOSS app. known as Natron?

To my knowledge, they started off with the idea of offering Nuke-like functionality and technology for free and now anyone who is using it can now just get Nuke proper if they weren’t planning to do commercial work.

I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if Natron just evaporates as a project now because of this move, they did not have a lot of time to cultivate a large following of loyal users.

It might evaporate, but I’d like to see it thrive. Natron isn’t really feature complete enough to use yet (in my opinion), but after messing with NUKE for a few days, I think if I had any compositing work that was commercial (although I’m currently a hobbiest), I would probably use Natron since it’s basically a clone at the moment.

Just in case anyone cares, the only current limitations to NUKE non commercial that I know of that are probably the most problematic, are 1080p max output resolution, and h.264 codec support is disabled. Neither of these are major at all for anyone who uses the software properly within the license. The h.264 support can easily be gotten around by simply rending our your video to a sequence of png’s or another file format.

Got the same email, overlooked it, thought it was PLE :o Happy to hear about this, i’ve been meaning to learn Nuke Studio.

I saw your post and I was thinking “I don’t think NUKE is all that badly priced”, and then I saw the pricing :eek:

To buy:
$4,213 to buy, $1,213 each year for maintenance

Or, you do monthly payments for a year as a freelancer:
$351.08, then you own it after a year and get the maintenance fee

So a bit steep for the people who don’t actually work in the industry. I guess I now understand why there are so many after effects users :slight_smile:

Yep, they do not expect people who work outside of studios to be picking it up. Its a problem with the Foundry itself. On one end you have these high brow british business men who only have eyes on the studios and push high prices because thats what they will pay. On the other you have people from Luxology (acquired by the foundy) trying to bring it down, make it more for everyone than that select group of “elites”. I’m not sure which side is winning here, but we now have Both Indie versions of Mari and Modo, with a Free Nuke (Non Commercial) but also price hikes on the full version software. So its hard to say.

Also to put it in perspective, one vfx house down here can pay for its nuke licenses in just a weeks worth of projects. Literally some 10-15 second shots which involve burn ins, clean up, roto…ect will earn that studio anywhere from $2000-$6000 give or take, so imagine when they do many of those…it really starts to pay for itself. Sadly its extremely rare if not impossible for individuals without connections to get those kind of bids. I knew one guy who claimed to have made around $10,000 a week off and on depending on the work. He was a Maya + Nuke user, ended up running a cg department at Sony I think. So that is the kind of people The Foundry is probably targeting with Nuke.

Schools, like they do with autodesk packages, generally teach Nuke as well. So this pretty much just helps consolidate their hold on that part of the market.

Looks like Black Magic with Fusion is the other commercial entity trying to really compete with the low and high end market, and on the open source front…Natron.

Yeah, that all makes sense. It really shows why after effects has such a huge community, and why it’s more for smaller studios and free lancers than NUKE.

But I’m sure teaching NUKE in schools is probably one of the big things that helps it keep it’s role as the industry standard.

I really hope Natron is successful. It will probably be my goto compositing app in the future if it matures enough. I could also be after effects though, (if I transition back to windows), but I like the idea of node based compositing since I’ve been using it since I started learning Blender.

Natron has a lot of potential and it doesn’t have any of the restrictions that Nuke non-commercial has, so there’s still potential for it to become a nice alternative for the little people that aren’t at studios and like playing around at full 2k or 4k (like me). Natron seems well coded, it just lacks a lot of the nodes that Nuke has and some of the ones they have are not as feature rich (yet). I particularly miss not having a glare node, match move export from the tracker, and a lens distortion node that analyzes the image sequence automatically.