Non-commercial Nuke versions released

The Foundry has released non-commercial (1920×1080) versions of its range of Nuke products (Nuke, NukeX and Nuke Studio).

They do have some limitations as I will list below, but if you are just starting out and wanting to do some stuff for your reel (while using the tools we use on feature films) or want to do some short films with friends, this is a great deal. Basically you get most of the functionality of Nukex/Studio but limited to HD resolution and you can only use it for your own home non-commercial projects. If you need higher resolution comping and able to work on commercial projects, then Fusion might be a better free option, but if you are familiar with Nuke or wish to eventually work in a facility that uses it, its worth a look.

What is non-commercial? The Foundry give the definition of that as being: “any usage of NUKE, NUKEX and NUKE STUDIO that does not make the user profit and is not in the provision of services to third-parties. Examples of Non-commercial usage are: personal learning, personal projects, experimentation and research. Indirect activities such as personal images or clips posted on YouTube or Vimeo that may generate advertising revenue are permitted.

The Nuke Non-commercial version has the following restrictions:

• Output resolution limited to HD (1920×1080).
• Disabled nodes including: The WriteGeo node, Primatte node, Ultimatte node, BlinkScript node, and GenerateLUT node are disabled in the Non-commercial NUKE range. Exporting a LUT from the MatchGrade node is also disabled.
• 2D format support disabled for MPEG4 and h264
• No third party plugin support: Only plug-ins that are shipped with NUKE can be used in the Non-commercial version. OFX plug-ins and custom plug-ins compiled with the NDK can only be used in the commercial version of NUKE.
• No Monitor output support: There is no video monitor output support in the Non-commercial NUKE range.
• Exporting NUKE STUDIO Sequences as EDL/XML is disabled.
• Encrypted data storage: All external data storage is encrypted, including NUKE scripts (these are saved with the extension .nknc), gizmos (saved with the extension .gznc), NUKE STUDIO timeline projects (saved with extension .hroxnc) and copying to the clipboard. Among other things, this means NUKE Non-commercial saves files in an encrypted format, unlike the commercial version, which saves scripts unencrypted as plain text. The commercial NUKE range cannot load files created with NUKE Non-commercial. The Non-commercial NUKE range can, however, load scripts and gizmos created with the commercial version.
• Limited Python scripting. The Non-commercial licenses of the NUKE range restrict the amount of nodes that can be retrieved at a time by scripting. Functions such as “nuke.allNodes()” in Python will return only the first 10 nodes available rather than all of them at once, and scripts written to iterate through the node graph will not be able to retrieve any more nodes beyond a set point. The commercial NUKE range can retrieve any and all nodes at any time as the command names would suggest.
• Frame Server slave rendering is disabled.
• Terminal mode restricted: Running NUKE in terminal mode (-t) is restricted to the use of existing .nknc scripts and Python files.

Here is the Foundry link for more info and download links: