University of Advancing Technology's Official Technology Blog

Do you know how visual effects are made? Green screen filming is made possible through digital visual effect applications like Nuke, a node-based composting toolkit.

Nuke is already a super useful program, but Gabe Vigil saw room for improvement in certain channel keys, specifically to make blue and green screen editing easier.

In Nuke, RBG and alpha channels link once a key is pulled. This makes it difficult to manipulate each channel individually, which results in users settling in the middle and sacrificing quality on each end. BetterKeyer unlinks the RGB and alpha channels so that each can be edited individually.

Gabe built the keying gizmo by creating an entire node graph made up of different nodes that are plugged in a certain order. He then selected the entire node graph together as one group and then individually selected specific attribute controls for the gizmo.

Gabe ran into the issue of trying to decide what everyone would find most useful, he states, “I didn’t want to have too much and make it bogged down with a bunch of controls, half of which don’t really matter. And I didn’t want it to have too limited control and not be useful.”

After placing, organizing and labeling all of the controls, BetterKeyer was exported as a gizmo file, which users are able to download onto their devices.

You can find BetterKeyer on Nukepedia, a site where Nuke users upload and download gizmos for free.

Learn more about UAT’s Digital Video degree.